4 Prominent Scientists Say Renewables Aren't Enough, Urge Support For Nuclear

First time accepted submitter Paddy_O'Furniture writes "Four prominent scientists have penned a letter urging those concerned about climate change to support nuclear energy, saying that renewables such as wind and solar will not be sufficient to meet the world's energy needs. Among the authors is James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist, whose 1988 testimony before the United States Congress helped launch discussions of global warming into the mainstream."

Comments

thorium

[Anonymous Coward]

let's do it right, please. no more melt-downs...

Re:thorium

[marcello_dl]

You got it upside down.

Being concerned with human-caused climate change, scientists plan to solve the problem with the proven capacity of nuclear to quickly get rid of humans. See the experiments of Hiroshima, Chernobyl...

Re:thorium

[Applehu Akbar]

We make every effort to fly without killing anyone, and yet the world loses roughly one planeload of passengers a year. Yet nobody ever calls for an end to aviation, even though each one of those crashes kills more people than all the nuclear meltdowns put together.

Re:thorium

[Anonymous Coward]

Thorium reactors aren't the only option for meltdown-proof reactors, it's obvious you are talking about liquid fluorine thorium molten salt reactors, but other types of thorium reactors are as prone to meltdown as existing PWR reactors. What makes LFT reactors impermeable to meltdown is both their negative thermal coefficient of reactivity and, most importantly, the absence of water in the reactor core. Molten lead, bismuth, small-modular-reactors and all forms of sub-criticality accelerator moderated reactors are all invulnerable to meltdown, due to the absence of steam, hydrogen and oxygen in the reactor core. All meltdowns or near meltdowns to-date have been caused by excess pressure from steam buildup in the reactor core and an inability to control thermal runaway. A reactor operating with a single-phase working fluid like lead, lead-bismuth (liquid-metal phase), Argon or CO2 (gas phase) have no phase-change event anywhere near their operating temperature, and therefore no source of pressure to create an explosion. Coal power stations have the same pre-cursor explosion risk as water reactors, though we don't take the same approach to safety as their is no fissionable material in those, though the environmental hazard when a coal reactor "melts down" is still severe.

I intentionally left Sodium-Potassium liquid metal reactors from that list, although those may be resistant to meltdown they have been plagued with fires, as the NaK working fluid spontaneously combusts on contact with air and reacts violently with water. Perhaps using NaK in SMRs is acceptable as the risk of contact with air when the entire reactor is self-contained is minimal, but the idea of mixing two highly combustible group-I metals together to make a more combustible liquid alloy seems insane to me. I also left out pebble bed reactors, as from my reading, it appears although they pose little to no risk of meltdown, they produce large amounts of radioactive graphite or zirconium dust from the friction of pebbles bashing together, that poses an enormous contamination burden at end-of-life.

I have heard and read a great deal about LFTR, and I am not convinced the technology is at an appropriate level of readiness, we currently don't have the materials required to make long-life plumbing for inside the reactor core, and while valuable from the point of view of being a rare element source, the technology to chemically separate the fission products produced in a LFTR is very expensive. The research reactor operating at LBNL in the 1960s cost hundreds of millions of dollars to cleanup, and while being net-positive energy-wise, was not a commercially viable reactor. LFTR is also not the only reactor technology capable of breeding fissile fuel from Thorium, India already has several commercial reactors breeding Uranium from Thorium fuel of Canadian CANDU design, as well as, IIRC, conventional LWR design.

My prediction is that SMR using Molten-lead, Molten-lead-bismuth or Helium working fluid will be the nuclear reactor of choice. I particularly favor the Hyperion Power Module commercialised from a Los Alamos design. It uses Pb-Bi working fluid, and the fuel cannot be removed from the reactor during operation (without difficult and obvious modification), reducing proliferation risks. It is also small enough that it can be mass-produced off-site, delivered, and returned to the manufacturer at end-of-fuel for refueling and refurbishment. It is also small enough that it can be easily installed below-grade and sealed in lead and concrete in the event of a catastrophic core failure (much less likely as there is no explosive steam in the core).

The goals of nuclear reactor design in the 1950s, which the technique, if not the exact design of large commercial reactors today were to have reactors that provided a significant enriched fuel source for proliferation, and to build large reactors cheaply in an age when automation was expensive and not well developed. Today, at least publicly, extractability of enriched fuel is considered a negati

Re:thorium

[macpacheco]

There hasn't been a single Generation III nuclear issue at all.
Generation II plants were designed in the 70s for Christ sake.
The biggest issue about nuclear is ignorance.
If the general population were fully informed on the diferences between gen III and gen IV nukes vs gen II, almost everyone would be on board, and there would be a movement towards REPLACING all Gen II plants with Gen III, instead of the current plan of leaving them alone in general !

If you don't know what I'm talking about, notice 95% of active nukes are generation II plants, 40 year old designs, 25yr or older plants. The only instance I would let them be kept operational would be in places that has ZERO earthquakes, ZERO hurricanes, ZERO risk of tsunami.

Gen IV plants are so much more reliable than Gen II, it's like comparing a 1940s car with a 2013 Prius in safety.

The real issue about nuclear is cost. And subsidies. That's why I believe all subsidies to all forms of energy should all be killed, leveling the playing field. Then things can be compared apples to apples. Strategic (clean) energy should be given low/zero interest loans, that's it.

Re:thorium

[ebno-10db]

the technology to chemically separate the fission products produced in a LFTR is very expensive

Is that the process using fluorine gas inside the plant to extract various components? I thought that its workability was basically demonstrated. Why is it expensive?

The research reactor operating at LBNL in the 1960s cost hundreds of millions of dollars to cleanup

Is that significantly more than other plants of that era? Why is it more expensive - is it related to the LFTR technology?

New Zealand (my nuclear-free home country)

Baah, those sheep still glow in the dark. Sorry about all those South Pacific nuclear tests back in the day.

Re:thorium

[FlyHelicopters]

So true, but people are funny emotional creatures... guns kill far fewer people than cars, but many people think they are evil. Same problem. Training can solve both problems (guns and cars), but heaven forbid we take a bad driver's car away.

Re:thorium

[dave420]

The moment the economy relies on people shooting guns in order to function, you'd have a point.

Re:thorium

[jez9999]

What do you think about using integral fast reactors like PRISMs?

Re:thorium

[Fuzzy Greybeard]

Most, if not all, existing reactors are built on fairly old technology principles. Things have changed a lot, in terms of both economics and technology, since the '70s It should be possible to build new nuclear facilities with sufficient safeguards based on the lessons that we have hopefully learned by now.

Re:thorium

[most irregular]

I keep reading and wondering if anyone ever considered the possibility that we might put our thinking in the direction of needing less rather than ways to continue to need and produce more. I have been studying energy needs and systems since graduate school in the 1970s and I fear that the future is, one might say, "Had," due to the acceptance that a new technology is just around the corner, or, that an old one may be able to be improved. Not likely. Needing less is the hardest, "sell," of all. Be well

Re:thorium

[catprog]

Do the crashed planes cause an area to be a no go zone?

Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[ThePhilips]

"Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs

The cheapness of the energy is IMO the largest part of the problem. We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy. We are overconsuming way too many goods (which cost energy to produce) and then go through even more energy wasting to compensate the overconsumption.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when someone like you tells the rest of us how much and what we can consume. It just reconfirms my suspicion that everyone else is an authoritarian at heart.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[tepples]

Would you prefer to consume everything so that your children have nothing left to consume?

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[gox]

Our entire systems are based on the paradigm of production and consumption. Even if the peoples of the world began acting so contrary to their education and upbringing, there would need to be a tremendous change in balance of power throughout the globe for what you say to become the norm.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[ThePhilips]

I love it when someone like you tells the rest of us how much and what we can consume. It just reconfirms my suspicion that everyone else is an authoritarian at heart.

May be.

My point is more about the relative cost. The energy now is cheap because when producing it, we disregard the future effects.

Yes, energy costs should go up, to pressure on the business and users to figure out ways to do more with less. Take smartphones as an example: driven by the limited battery capacity, they manage to do much much more than PCs of only 10 years ago - at a fraction of energy consumed.

But I wouldn't go as far as calling it "authoritarian". Levies and taxes throughout the history were used to regulate supply and demand. Energy is just another commodity which requires the regulation.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[JWW]

No, I would prefer for the market to determine the value of rare commodities. Then as rare commodities run out, their prices will rise and we'll look for new inexpensive commodities to fill our needs.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Barsteward]

ahaa.. so you are the greedy AC bastard who doesn;t care about anyone else but yourself then....

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[ThePhilips]

The problem is that when the "rare commodities run out," it would lead to a major reshape of our economies, states and societies. Historically that means: poverty and inequality, civil wars and wars.

IMO on the line here, is to prove that we as civilization are mature enough not to shoot ourselves into the foot.

Degenerating into primitive fighting over the scarce resources is precisely what society strives to avoid.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[greg_barton]

In other words, "third world people should stay in their place."

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[greg_barton]

What do you think will change the quickest: our available energy, or basic human nature?

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Gravis Zero]

"Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs

The cheapness of the energy is IMO the largest part of the problem. We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy.

i agree we use too much energy but i disagree with your solution. jacking up the price of electricity is going to hurt the poor a lot more than everyone else. i think the correct approach is to require devices to meet a certain level of efficiency based on it's device type (CRTs and x86 would be goners!) and gradually increase that. same goes for newly constructed buildings. as the amount of energy being used goes down, the price of it will go up. if you do this in reverse, more efficient products will be expensive and you will get deceptive efficiency numbers because they aren't tested under standardized conditions.

either way, when the price of distributed electricity goes up, solar will become an attractive option.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[dasunt]

The cheapness of the energy is IMO the largest part of the problem. We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy. We are overconsuming way too many goods (which cost energy to produce) and then go through even more energy wasting to compensate the overconsumption.

While I am frustrated at the inefficiencies found in a modern house or office, I see cheap energy being both part of the problem and part of the solution.

You've given an example of how it is part of the problem.

Here's how it's part of the solution: Some sustainable methods require far more energy than non-sustainable methods. One simple example would be sewage. What takes far more energy?: Simply dumping the sewage directly into a lake, or processing the sewage until the result is pure enough to drink?

If you're worried about how much energy is being used, I'd suggest the following to advocate for incentives to minimize energy usage. One obvious example would be electrical bills. There's frequently a reoccuring monthly flat fee, as well as the cost per kwh. Say $10 flat fee, plus $0.10 per kwh. A household that uses a miniscule 100 kwh/mo ends up paying $20 A household that uses a massive 1000 kwh/mo ends up paying $110. Even though the later household uses ten times more energy, it pays a bill less than six times as large. The closer and closer one gets to minimizing energy usage, the less of an incentive it becomes, since the flat fees become more and more of the bill.

Another idea would be to incentivize creating devices with low standby-power usage. This could be done through mandatory reporting on the device itself (e.g. estimate 22 hours of standby use of power each day and have the item display the yearly standby electrical cost) or through a tax based on how much energy a device uses instandby mode.

But I think another step is education. There's low energy usage houses. I'd *like* a low energy house myself, something like a Passivhaus, but most USians aren't even aware of the idea.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[girlintraining]

Degenerating into primitive fighting over the scarce resources is precisely what society strives to avoid.

Really? Because over here in the United States, we seem to be encouraging exactly that scenario -- cut education, oppose health care, restrict labor unions, drive wages down, concentrate wealth, ignore environmental initiatives, and create a debt-based economy for the poor and an investment-based economy for the rich.

Are you suggesting the United States is striving to leave modern society? Or perhaps, what you meant to say that fighting over the scarce resources is what an idealized society strives to avoid.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[SerpentMage]

You are making a major failure in your logic. You are thinking that if we all hold back and be nice all will work out. You see human mentality is not like that. If there is a chance to fart in your face somebody will do it, whether you like it or not. This is part of a civil civilization. Here is a really simple example. Germany and the EU. Economists have shown time and time again, domestic consumption needs to be increased in Germany. And time and time again Germany says "no we build better products and it is up to others to catch up." This is a pile or shit! Yes Germany has many advantages, but they are taking major advantage of the Euro, for under normal circumstances the DM would have shot up like the CHF.

You see, we should be civilized enough to have Germany cooperate. (BTW if all were exporters who would consume? That point is lost on the Germans.)

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Karmashock]

While this is true, the answer is not inflate energy prices. Doing that will just hurt poor people that actually have a hard time making ends meet even if they are efficient.

Consider what higher gas prices are doing to poor people. Sure, you're making the middle class consider efficient cars a bit more but you're basically making it hard for poorer people to even have cars at all. By the same token, many people live in homes or apartments that they had no hand in designing and thus have no ability to control energy costs. They're too poor. They simply accept what the market offers them and pay it because they have no choice. Raising costs hurts them.

The best thing in everyone's interest is to keep all costs as low as possible and just let the technology advance. Give this some time. We're at the cusp of fixing a lot of these problems but we need the economic stability and growth to fund them. Pushing the whole system into poverty to make people efficient will retard technological development and actually make real change take longer.

Stop f'ing people over to "save" the environment. All it does it hurt poor people and make the few people at the top that control the limited supply rich.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[__aaltlg1547]

The average home could heat and insulate itself on packing materials from Amazon alone.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[__aaltlg1547]

Hasn't that always been the goal?

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[DarkOx]

You see, we should be civilized enough to have Germany cooperate. (BTW if all were exporters who would consume? That point is lost on the Germans.)

You seem to be caught in the zero sum game mental trap. The Germans are correct, the rest of Europe needs to catch up. While the net flow of wealth needs to eventually balance you can all be exporters in terms of product. Eventually the Germans will want to spend that money on something, that is something some other economy can sell them, something can't perhaps produce themselves.

Without the euro, you are right the DM would have shot up, but if the rest of the euro zone became as productive as the German economy, then prices of everything would fall, dragging the DM back down with them. Consumption would increase as it always does when prices fall, when everyone becomes more productive living standards increase! That is the way you should want to solve the problem.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Jmc23]

It's funny how you talk about 'poor' people owning cars without batting an eyelash. Ah, you 1%'s.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Karmashock]

I live in los angeles where illegal aliens own cars.

You're an idiot.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[khallow]

Would you prefer to consume everything so that your children have nothing left to consume?

Note that isn't the actual problem here. The resources in question are cheap and plentiful. As they become less plentiful, they'll become more expensive. Then the price will rise and demand will go down. That's how markets work. And it'll be far more effective when it happens than rationing cheap resources for ideological reasons.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[khallow]

The problem is that when the "rare commodities run out," it would lead to a major reshape of our economies, states and societies.

It's worth noting here that the US has gone through many a "major reshape" of the sort described above: whale oil, free range cattle, precious metals, etc. It didn't generate a lot of drama.

IMO on the line here, is to prove that we as civilization are mature enough not to shoot ourselves into the foot.

Then you would have at least considered the merits of doing nothing. Think for once. Your original complaint was that energy was too cheap and it results in "wasteful" behavior.

The cheapness of the energy is IMO the largest part of the problem. We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy. We are overconsuming way too many goods (which cost energy to produce) and then go through even more energy wasting to compensate the overconsumption.

The only problem here is that you are completely ignoring what else is going on. Energy-wise, society is not about optimizing energy use. It is about applying that energy to do productive things. Spending considerable effort just to optimize slightly use of a very cheap resource is a waste of the rest of society's resources.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[tepples]

As they become less plentiful, they'll become more expensive. Then the price will rise and demand will go down.

Unless the prices rise so sharply that the rise destabilizes governments.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[ThePhilips]

Spending considerable effort just to optimize slightly use of a very cheap resource is a waste of the rest of society's resources.

Just count all what USA has "spent" on the influence and wars in the Middle East.

Or dealing with the consequences of the "bad weather" on the east coast.

You can that "cheap"?

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[khallow]

Unless the prices rise so sharply that the rise destabilizes governments.

Hasn't happened yet. And I don't see how it could be any worse than artificially rationing a plentiful substance. That can destabilize governments too.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[khallow]

Just count all what USA has "spent" on the influence and wars in the Middle East.

Or dealing with the consequences of the "bad weather" on the east coast.

Those are non sequiturs since they don't have anything to do with energy. Most of what the US spends, whether it be in the Middle East or elsewhere is due to corruption and bribes. Similarly, there's been no actual linkage between the usual weather that the US east gets and global warming.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[ALeader71]

The problem with your theory is that it hits the poor the hardest. The wealthy get all of the energy they want. The middle class, well they get squeezed. "Sorry son/daughter, college isn't in the cards for you. Maybe you could join the service and get used as a tool of foreign policy. Hand me another blanket, it's gonna be cold tonight." Jacking up energy prices doesn't lead to greater efficiency. Offering discounts on energy efficiency however DOES lead to greater efficiency, and makes higher cost improvements cheaper as more competitors enter the market and existing manufacturers learn how to make the same products for less money. Eventually you won't need the discounts as whatever technologies you promote become commoditized. Discounts drive consumers. Punishment/taxes discourage consumption.

Unfortunately, this doesn't hold true for apartment complexes. They have little incentive to modernize. Taxes however are an even bigger disincentive to apartment complex corporations than they are to home owners. The discounts must be created to benefit these kinds of businesses. The poor of course will be the last to benefit as they have the least to spend. The way out of that is education and opportunity. We won't eliminate poverty, but we can elevate what is defined as poverty. A poor person of 40 years ago had a lot less than a poor person does today in part due to commoditization.

Finally, if the means of wealth generation are placed well out of reach, then invention is retarded or halted completely. The IT revolution of the 90s and the on-going Big Data revolution can only exist in a country where electricity is both affordable and plentiful. Make turning on that computer or light a major cost decision and you'll loose those driven individuals that are creating the next economy.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[sandytaru]

But why wouldn't you want to make your consumption less? We cut our power bill by a third just by installing a solar hot water heating system. No inefficient solar panels - just a propylene glycol tube and an extra water tank. We get all the hot water we could ever use this way. (Actually, our water consumption itself went up since everyone happily takes extra long showers now.)

Consuming less power doesn't mean doing without. It means making the most energy efficient choices. (The insulated curtains I put in our living room a few months ago already paid for themselves, too.)

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[ThePhilips]

The problem with your theory is that it hits the poor the hardest.

Yes. From the comments, yours included, I have noticed that, unlike the EU, poverty and inequality is still a big problem in USA. (I'm not sure I can formulate the answer in more palatable terms.)

Your comment is a sad statement on the state of the unbound capitalism prevailing in the USA, where everybody's on their own. That, sadly, completely prevents adding any kind of predictability, stability and planning to the system. And planning is what is required if we are to solve the energy problem.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Karmashock]

So let me get this straight.

If I tell you that poor people have a hard time owning a car then I am a member of the 1 percent.

Then I tell you that illegal aliens in Los Angeles own cars thus proving that poor people do in fact own cars which was apparently a surprise to you.

Then you say I must be poor and stupid because I corrected you and proved you wrong?

You're a fucktard. Good game. Do not respond. You lose. Close the window, log off the internet, and then kill yourself. No really. Kill yourself.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Jmc23]

um, pretty much ALL of the US is part of the 1%, well, more like 4%, but why quibble over 3%, you're all stinking rich.

Why would you think illegal aliens are poor? They're there because they take all the jobs that the legal people don't want to take. They have money, they aren't poor by any means and neither is pretty much anybody in all the US.

Granted, i did miss a comma there. It should have been. Are they poor, idiot?

Learn to read, fucktard!

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[RespekMyAthorati]

I suppose you are referring to the "free" market, also known as the "fantasy" market.
There's no such thing.
Never was. Never will be.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[yndrd1984]

Yes. Yes. Yes. I really don't understand how someone could be so certain of facts that they are so incorrect about:

Education
According to a 2005 report from the OECD, the United States is tied for first place with Switzerland when it comes to annual spending per student on its public schools, with each of those two countries spending more than $11,000.

Health
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the United States spent more on health care per capita ($8,608), and more on health care as percentage of its GDP (17.2%), than any other nation in 2011.

Wages
Rank: 1
Country: United States
Disposable USD 2011: 42,050
Gross USD2011: 54,450

Outcomes may be worse than other countries, but when it comes to those three things, we really are #1.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[FlyHelicopters]

You assume that your own experience translates to anyone else. We have a pair of 50 gallon natural gas hot water heaters. They cost about $30/month to run for the pair of them. Our monthly average utility bill is about $300. So 10% of our bill is making hot water. I could make it "free" and it would only cut our bill by 10%. Not everyone has the same energy use that you do.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Karmashock]

Wow, so your new defense is that every american is part of some ultra privileged elite... and thus its wrong for us to want little things like "cars" or "electric lights".

Your idiotic fanaticism is actually really useful. Most people are fooled at first and give people like you the benefit of the doubt. Happily, most of you are crazy enough that if given a chance you'll start sputtering and foaming at the mouth like mental patients.

And then you really just make my argument for me. Who is going to support if they actually know what you really think? Pretty much no one. You are a believer in mass social suicide.

Do the environment a favor and cut your dick off. Again, by your own logic this is good for the environment. You shouldn't have children. Ever. Not even one.

And while you're at it, get off the internet. Only evil 1 percenters have computers. Then get yourself a mud hut and enjoy the squallier.

Again... no need to reply. If you reply it just means you sat there and wasted more electricity and used a computer made from heavy metals in sweatshops in asia.

You're not going to be able to pee on me from down there, pal. You have no standing to presume superiority with me. You're little more then a brainwashed sock puppet that had his brains craved out like a Halloween pumpkin and then filled with a conga line of suicidal politics. Aka a "tool".

Seriously. Kill yourself. No really.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[dave420]

The healthcare spending is pretty silly, as it includes the money made by insurance companies. If you saw how much was actually spent on healthcare, things wouldn't look so rosy. And just by looking at numbers is no indication of what those numbers mean. Throwing money into a broken system doesn't magically stop the broken system being broken. US wages might be high, but the quality of life of an average worker is nowhere near as good as for one in, say, Europe. Outcomes indeed are where it's at, and the US is nowhere near #1 in any of those categories.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[rally2xs]

Uh, that would be "cut FEDERAL GOV'T spending on education", "cut FEDERAL GOV'T spending on health care," etc. Get the frappin' gov't the H out of having its fingers in everything and give the free market a chance to operate and our wants and needs will be met. Get the gov't out of the habit of taxing INCOME and we'll be prosperous beyond what we can currently imagine. There's other things to tax, but taxing income is taxing prosperity. As RR said, "If you want less of something, tax it" and that has worked superbly to spread poverty across the land.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[rally2xs]

Wages in the US are NOT among the highest of any other country, that is a lie that they've told us as an excuse for not doing anything about the offshoring of jobs, yet German auto workers average about $66 an hour,l while ours are now below $33 and falling. The reason for offshoring is the income taxes, which if abolished would return the USA to world dominance in manufacturing and near-universal prosperity. But the politicians like the power that the IRS gives them to screw with our lives, so getting rid of the income tax is difficult.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[intermodal]

Which would be totally unnecessary with Thorium reactors. The only reason we didn't continue developing them was their byproducts were too clean. Governments wanted the plutonium produced by uranium reactors.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[girlintraining]

Yes. Yes. Yes. I really don't understand how someone could be so certain of facts that they are so incorrect about:

Possibly because they read the correct wikipedia article; the one where it says what the literacy rate is, instead of the amount of money thrown at a failed system.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[greg_barton]

To be fair thorium reactors are not 100% proliferation proof, but they are much better than light water uranium based reactors. It all comes down to passive safety. With passive safe designs it is much more feasible to seal the reactor vessel, and with sealing comes greater proliferation resistance.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Jmc23]

It's always amusing to see how long it takes people to figure out they're talking to a mirror.

You are special, you're so self absorbed you'll never realize there's this thing called reality outside your little bubble. There ends my graciousness.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[catprog]

So assuming you can make it free for $500 . You will get a payback of less then two years?

Even if it cost $1000 and you would otherwise get 10% on that. You still are ahead after 6 years.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[catprog]

Try 4.5% and that is assuming all the people in the USA are richer then everyone else on the planet.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Jmc23]

I put errors in every single one of my posts so that those who can't grasp the bigger picture have an opportunity to make themselves feel special and justified.

Yup, I'm generous like that. :)

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[FlyHelicopters]

Yes, but it costs a whole lot more than $500 to install a solar water heater, at least one that will provide the amount of hot water that we require.

http://www.rheem.com/products/solar_water_heating/

Just one example... about $7,000 installed for a 120 gallon system, a bit less for an 80 gallon system. About 15 years to pay it back, give or take a bit, not a good use of money.

We have 5 people in the house and use 30,000 gallons a month on average. Granted, a lot of that is for landscaping, but we also use a lot inside the house for dishwashing, clothes, showers, and baths. We do not have a pool, but plan to add one next year, that will of course increase our use of water.

Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[Karmashock]

You have not once made a coherent argument. I laid out an argument and you responded with cheap evasions.

Your presumption of superiority at this point is as disappointing as it is predictable.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[angel'o'sphere]

Yeah, exactly. Because the rest of the world has a health care market (which is not regulated by "government" laws).
For what do you want a government if everything the government is doing you don't want?
You seem not to grasp the simple concept for what a government is for.
A free market never will feed, educate, house, health care the poor. If the market can do what it wants the rich ones will exploit the poor ones till they die.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[angel'o'sphere]

The numbers are pretty pointless when everything mainly covers the top 30% of the population and barely covers the next 50% and 20% or more get nothing from it.

Especially if you take into account costs etc. we know that "on paper" the US average wage is higher than e.g. in germany. But: the amount (%) of people who can not live from their wages in the USA is the highest in relation to other first world countries. You see ... the few super rich you have completely fuck up the averages ... and non the less you use the averages to draw conclusions.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[angel'o'sphere]

In germany we have income tax, too ...

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[yndrd1984]

Possibly because they read the correct wikipedia article...

I'm sorry, but I tried to make clear that I was not talking about outcomes at all, only spending. The fact that the US's literacy rate sucks doesn't mean that they didn't spend the money.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[yndrd1984]

Throwing money into a broken system doesn't magically stop the broken system being broken.

I agree completely, but that doesn't change the fact that they really are throwing the most money (per capita) into their system.

My point was the no matter how bad their system is or what issue you look at, a general lack of money can't possibly be at the root of the problem, because every society in the history of the world has managed to get by with less.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[yndrd1984]

One person said: "Wages in the US are amongst the top of ANY other country."
Which is true.
Another person said: "No."
Which is a false.

The fact that you came up with a much more intelligent response, pointing out that that fact wasn't that important, and has to be interpreted in light of other facts, doesn't mean that the original statement was incorrect.

Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap.

[angel'o'sphere]

Well, I don't know if it is true as we all always only see "average wages".

I doubt a worker in the car industry in the USA earns more than an equivalent worker in germany, italy or france.

And I bet I can challange this for nearly every trade. But I guess the medicals and laywers compensate for that :D

Correction

[fustakrakich]

Nobody can get obscenely rich from renewable easy to produce energy, therefore it is not, nor will ever be practical.

Re:Correction

[lennier1]

The money isn't in the energy itself but in producing more and more efficient hardware to harvest that energy so the customer has a financial incentive to upgrade.

Re:Correction

[Mr D from 63]

Nobody can get obscenely rich from renewable easy to produce energy, therefore it is not, nor will ever be practical.

Except Al Gore, of course (kidding). But seriously, lower cost, easier to produce, reliable and clean energy that can scale up is a combination that would make you very rich if you could devise such a thing. Meanwhile, there are people today making big money off of wind and solar. It is popular, relatively easy to build or install, and is highly incentivized, making it a great place to 'make a killing' if you know how to do it.

Re:Correction

[__aaltlg1547]

You could get pretty rich selling the equipment.

Re:Correction

[dnaumov]

Nobody can get obscenely rich from renewable easy to produce energy, therefore it is not, nor will ever be practical.

Elon Musk would like to have a word with you...

Logic!

[onyxruby]

Logic is a wonderful thing and we need more critical thinking and less hyperbole with regards to green energy. Strident hyperbole with regards to the anti-nuclear energy has resulted in the real world build of coal power plants as renewals simply are suitable for baseline power. Coal power plants also release far more pollution and for the ignorant they also result in a lot of radiation being released into the air.

Nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest pollution, best carbon footprint of anything we have (it's largest footprint comes from the concrete used in it's construction) and could be far cheaper if it wasn't severely over-regulated. Thorium reactors are also starting to get planned for production and deserve a good look (and if fact a proof of concept plant was built in the past). Thorium reactors have the green advantages of nuclear reactors and should be included.

It's time to get real about getting green and put the likes of Greenpeace out to pasture. They have done far more harm to the environment than just about anyone short of the Koch brothers.

Re:Logic!

[gweihir]

Lowest pollution? I guess little things like Windscale, Tchernobyl, and Fuckushima are removed from that calculation...

Re:Logic!

[girlintraining]

Lowest pollution? I guess little things like Windscale, Tchernobyl, and Fuckushima are removed from that calculation...

Nope. Go ahead and include them. You'll get to about .1% of the emissions of coal power plants with every nuclear disaster. Ever. Including all of the nuclear bomb tests, the two bombs we dropped on Japan, three mile island, and more.

Fun fact: Coal plants collectively emit more radiation in a year than all those disasters combined have, and that's when you include into the figures the yearly radiation the nuclear plants emit into the environment as well.

Coal: Because glowing green is fun.

Re:Logic!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lowest pollution? Because hydro power, wind power, solar power... totally pollute more than nuclear wastes.

Re:Logic!

[jonbryce]

How many square kilometers of land have been made completely uninhabitable for the next 200 years or so as a result of coal power?

Re:Logic!

[HoochTHX]

Thorium should have been the mainstream Nuclear solution long ago:
Kirk Sorensen has been a huge proponent of this.
http://energyfromthorium.com/
5 min version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
97min version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3rL08J7fDA

Re: Logic!

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the mining areas of PA or WV and yoy can answer that.

Re:Logic!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much that coal makes kilometers of land uninhabitable, as it kills off small chunks of land in maybe 50 square meters at a time. Stuff like Fly ash and what not aren't particularly good at killing off kilometers of land in big accidents like nuclear is, but they are good at killing off hundreds of thousands of people/animals in relatively small areas over a large area.

Re:Logic!

[The Grim Reefer]

How many square kilometers of land have been made completely uninhabitable for the next 200 years or so as a result of coal power?

A lot. Not only for discarded waste, but mine fires. Centralia, Pennsylvania has been burning since 1962 and will be burning for the next 1000 years by most estimates. Then there are other mine fires all over the planet. It does look like there may be some success with extinguishing these on the horizon. But regardless, they are devastating to the local ecosystem and have all of the problems with burning coal for energy ,but with none of the energy.

Re:Logic!

[The123king]

They've both been rebuilt...

Re:Logic!

[Barsteward]

yep, but have you seen the children still being born with deformities in these cities?

Re:Logic!

[Alarash]

What about private companies who go easy on safety to turn a quick buck? See Fukushima where years before the incident reports were written indicating that the facility wouldn't survive a tsunami. Or when Areva drops nuclear waste in the rivers of France? The problem isn't with nuclear power per se, it's what our brilliant capitalistic society makes of it. We, as a civilization, are too bent on the short-time, low-hanging fruit of easy money to be trusted with anything as dangerous as nuclear fission reactors. When money isn't the only real God we worship, maybe we could consider it. How about storage of the nuclear waste? That's not going anywhere and is a huge problem by itself, and you should consider it in your carbon footprint calculation.

Re:Logic!

[Gravis Zero]

Logic is a wonderful thing and we need more critical thinking and less hyperbole with regards to green energy. Strident hyperbole with regards to the anti-nuclear energy has resulted in the real world build of coal power plants as renewals simply are suitable for baseline power.

ARE YOU CRAZY?! if we do that, we'll bankrupt the economy, everyone will be homeless and we'll be slaves to Big Green and Big Nuke! before you know it, we'll be GLOWING green because of all that radiation! DO YOU WANT THAT?!

Re:Logic!

[AmiMoJo]

Er, no. Fukushima alone has put out about order of magnitude more radiation than every coal plant in the history of the world ever. This response completely debunks the article you linked to, and this chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.

In fact the paper that the article you linked to is based on doesn't even support what the article says, but I guess you didn't read it.

Re:Logic!

[AmiMoJo]

You are aware that a lack of regulation is what allowed Fukushima to go without being upgraded to a state that would have survive the earthquake and tsunami, even though the operator had been warned, right?

Interesting the World Justice Project Rule of Law index for 2012-13 rates Japan as having slightly more effective regulation than the US.

Re:Logic!

[AmiMoJo]

Go read the paper in the response I linked to, it includes mercury discharge.

Re: Logic!

[__aaltlg1547]

Uranium mines aren't any better.

Re:Logic!

[geoskd]

How many square kilometers of land have been made completely uninhabitable for the next 200 years or so as a result of coal power?

That would be none. The wildlife is still quite happy living in and around every nuclear disaster site. It is just picky humans that refuse to live there. People are afraid that they will get cancer and die (some of the dumber people imagine mutating...). Fun fact: The cancer rates in and around coal mining towns are obscenely high, as are the increased frequency of various ailments related to air quality just about everywhere on the planet... If we applied the same paranoia to the statistical odds of illness from coal related diseases, half of Pennsylvania would be "uninhabitable", just to name one area. People have an irrational fear of nuclear power and radiation. They would be better served by being afraid to get behind the wheel of a car...

Re:Logic!

[geoskd]

Er, no. Fukushima alone has put out about order of magnitude more radiation than every coal plant in the history of the world ever. This response completely debunks the article you linked to, and this chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.

Ok, lets use the information from stack exchange. They quote the uranium limits from coal plants as being less than 10 parts per million. Lets use 10% of that as the baseline. 1 part per million. The annual coal emissions are on the order of 1.7 billion *tons* of CO2 per year. 1 part per million would be on the order of 1700 tons of uranium per year. By contrast, Chernobyl had about 180 tons of nuclear material, and blew up once... Fukushima had about 10 times that much at the facility, the vast majority of which never left the facility. Three mile island contained all but trace amounts of the core material.

So in the history of nuclear power, coal has released somewhere in the neighborhood of 85,000 tons of uranium into the atmosphere, and all of the nuclear accidents combined have released... wait for it... less than 300 tons.

Wow, just wow.

Re:Logic!

[Mike610544]

Neither article (OP or this response) seem to support the assertions made in the posts.

Also, is "amount of radiation" a good metric for harm done? Seems like that leaves out a lot of factors that would affect the real world impact.

One thing that seems clear is that (even ignoring climate change) fossil fuels cause a lot more deaths than nuclear.

Re:Logic!

[Ksevio]

I don't think you fully read the sentence you quoted...

Re:Logic!

[chmod a x mojo]

Actually you can't directly compare Fukushima to the radiation released by coal combustion. Most of the radio-nucleotides released from Fukushima were I(131) and Cs(137) with half-lives of 7 days and 30 years respectively.

Compare that to the release of coal plants: U(238) and Th(232) which have half-lives of 4.47GA and 14GA ( GA is billion years ). While doing this we can see that coal combustion releases particles that are much longer lived so stay building up in environments. Compared to Fukushima, from which most of the Iodine is decayed already added to the fact that the Cs will be decayed to harmless levels within the next 100-200 years it is quite obvious that coal is putting out both more ( when looked at from coal combustion total over the years, not just from power plant combustion, although it is arguable for just power combustion as well ) and longer lasting radioisotopes when we look at the remaining and forecast-ed radiation graphs comparing them.

One could argue about the radiation from Chernobyl, as that contained parts of the core - at least near the reactor building itself - but that can and should be considered an outlier. It was a study in both piss poor management as well as how not to design and run a reactor. You will notice that in the relatively few accidents newer western designed reactors have had that none of them have had the cores open to atmosphere even after a partial or even complete meltdown.

This also does not take into account all the other pollutants released by burning coal, the fuels burned in mining and transport of the coal to where it is burned, or the environmental cost of the mining of the coal itself (many more tons of coal / year is required VS. tons of nuclear fuel) . When factored against the nuclear waste ( which can be reprocessed at least partially now, and should be looked into better reprocessing in the future ) coal is several orders of magnitude worse than nuclear.

Does this make nuclear "good"? No, it just makes it, environmentally, overall a better choice than coal. Are there even better alternatives? Probably, at least until we can get into much higher efficiency with our nuclear fuels.

Re:Logic!

[jonbryce]

for the next 200 years

It used to be like that in Britain. In 1956 we passed the clean air act and things started to improve quite quickly after that.

Re:Logic!

[cartman]

How many square kilometers of land have been made completely uninhabitable for the next 200 years or so as a result of coal power?

If you count global warming and sea-level rise, then large areas of the surface of the Earth including Bangladesh and Florida, will be uninhabitable for 3,000+ years.

All I can do is pull my hair out and cry.

Climate change is caused by a confederacy between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives deny that it exists, and liberals make it happen.

Re: Logic!

[ultranova]

Uranium mines aren't any better.

Sure they are: they're smaller. Also, they might become unnecessary, since you can extract uranium from seawater.

Re:Logic!

[cartman]

That may be true, however a typical coal burning plant still causes more deaths over its lifetime than a nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. An average coal-burning plant causes thousands of deaths from respiratory disease and heart disease throughout its 40-year lifetime (not taking into account the deaths that will be caused by climate change) whereas the total number of predicted fatalities from all 4 melted down reactors at Fukushima is less than 1,000.

Re:Logic!

[subreality]

Your sources and the GP's don't actually conflict. They're just measuring different things.

The XKCD image is comparing Sieverts - absorbed dose - at a specific location. If you were staring into the core of Chernobyl, you received a massive dose. That effect is very localized.

The Scientific American article is comparing the regional effects: typical releases divided over a few hundred square miles.

The "coal far outweighs nuke" argument is based on global effects: While Chernobyl was intensely bad locally, the average effect over the whole surface of the Earth was very small - much smaller than the net emissions of coal.

These are all based on Sieverts/Rems. They measure instantaneous levels. The thing with coal is it's a gift that keeps on giving: the nuke shine of Chernobyl was intensely bad if you were there; a large number of becquerels (decays per second) of iodine-131 were released from Fukushima but it had an 8 day half-life. With coal it's a much longer half life and much more widespread. While there are no spatial and temporal hotspots like you have with nuke disasters, it keeps on going, so the everyone on the surface of the Earth will keep getting hit not just today, but for their entire lives.

The average human will absorb far more radiation from coal than from all nuke disasters. The numbers either way are small enough that you have other things to worry about as an individual, but coal is definitely going to cause a higher net number of cancers globally.

Re:Logic!

[serviscope_minor]

Lowest pollution?

Yep. Even with those.

That said,

I guess little things like Windscale,

If you're going to argue against nuclear *power*, then it's a little disengenuous to include Windscale. It was not a power plant. It was a very early bodge job to make plutonium, not generate power.

Re:Logic!

[Uberbah]

He was in too big a hurry to jump to one of two fallacies relied on by nuclear power fanboys: that opposing nuclear power means loving coal. The second fallacy is that if you don't love coal, you must love huge hydro dams subject to failure and massive flooding.

Re:Logic!

[WWJohnBrowningDo]

They quote the uranium limits from coal plants as being less than 10 parts per million.

Let's not forget that this 10ppm is the EPA guideline. There are plenty of places in the world with looser regulation (and even no regulation) on coal emissions. So that makes 1700 tons of uranium the best case scenario. I shudder to think what the worst case scenario would be.

Re:Logic!

[loneDreamer]

and this chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.

Just need to point out that it does not. Especially since it only includes things like the effect to a single person, for very narrow times/events. This chart, while amazing, is not comparing total levels of anything!

Re:Logic!

[gweihir]

Nice. You have eaten the FUD. I am not talking about the nuclear fuel factory, I am talking about the nuclear reactor at Windscale that suffered a containment breach and 3-day fire in its reactor core in 1957. Look it up sometime.

Re:Logic!

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

The parent post is bullshit. And even if it weren't...

Based on the chart you've linked to and the yearly background radiation levels, the levels for 2 weeks in the Fukushima exclusion zone, you might equally conclude something very different with a bit of extra knowledge. The radiation levels are a bit lower than just after the incident (some due to physics and some due to unrealistic assumptions about soil, etc.) and also vary with distances from the radioactive fuel source.

Japan is still trying to figure out if 1mSv or 20mSv or 5mSv is the appropriate yearly limit extra for anyone who would live in the exclusion zone. From the chart you posted 2mSv is what you get for just having a head scan and 4mSv is what an average person gets from background radiation.

Now for a geek that doesn't play with many radiation emitting toys and lives in insulated basements, receiving little UV exposure from the sun or non-concreted ground, might mean he is missing out on 4 or so mSv per year and it might make sense to stick a uranium rod under your floorboards or move to the Fukushima exclusion zone! Well, that or go outside occasionally and eat bananas.

Re:Logic!

[yndrd1984]

What? You think that kids health doesn't get messed up by of coal?

Re:Logic!

[Soralin]

A major flaw in your argument here: Uranium isn't very radioactive. Fuel pellets for nuclear reactors, that have not yet been used, you can handle with your hands without much in the way of problems (heavy metal poisoning, like with a block of lead, would be far more significant than any radiation here). On the other hand, once they've been through a reactor, you don't want to be anywhere near them.

The major source of radioactivity comes from the fission products. Heavy atoms need to be more neutron-rich to be stable, and lighter atoms are stable with a more even ratio of protons and neutrons. So when you split a heavy atom, you generally end up with a couple of lighter atoms which are far too neutron-rich to be stable, and which fairly rapidly decay into other things, producing and radiating away energy in the process (i.e. radiation).

That's where all of the lasting radioactivity comes from, after the reactor has been turned off. Uranium has far too long a half-life, billions of years, or hundreds of millions of years, for the main couple of isotopes, to have much effect on the amount of radioactivity. (generally, the longer the half-life, the less radiation, since a long half-life means less decay events per period of time. The candle that burns half as long burns twice as bright, or something like that. Isotopes that decay over a period of years for example, would produce approximately 8-9 orders of magnitude more radiation.)

Re:Logic!

[Your.Master]

Opposing nuclear power may not mean loving coal, but a blanket opposition of nuclear is a de facto support of coal. Yes, you can throw examples where renewables work, and guess-what: I support that. Use renewables there. Keep making renewables better. Do it! It's worth it. And be ready to admit there are a few places where it doesn't work out, and you have to make a decision: coal, nuclear, human evacuation, whatever it is -- my money's on nuclear since the negative effects are concentrated and that's a good thing, except for the PR

It's not going to be easy, because if it was, we'd have already done it and saved the Internet a lot of arguments.

People who are stuck on a single silver-bullet are broken. Even coal has advantages. But it looks like the downsides aren't worth it most of the time, and with all the available alternatives, including but not limited to nuclear, we don't have to deal with them.

Re:Logic!

[MrKaos]

Logic is a wonderful thing and we need more critical thinking and less hyperbole with regards to green energy.

Let's test that.

Strident hyperbole with regards to the anti-nuclear energy has resulted in the real world build of coal power plants as renewals simply are suitable for baseline power.

Nuclear generation has a ramp up time to respond to basload conditions. Baseload power is a function of the grid, not of a single form of generation. Solar Thermal is responsive for baseload and wind is more scaleable than nuclear or coal.

Coal power plants also release far more pollution and for the ignorant they also result in a lot of radiation being released into the air.

It's not radiation that is being released, it's radionuclides that emit radiation, the destinction being that radiation doesn't get into the food chain, radinuclides do. ALL radionuclide release into the environment produces mutagenic responses in metabolisms that in many cases result in some form of cancer. So yeah, it's a problem for the coal industry and the nuclear industry.

Radionuclides from coal plants are also not artificially enriched, so they are less *radioactive*.

Nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest pollution, best carbon footprint of anything we have

The point of nuclear power isn't carbon footprint, it's "Net Energy Return". You can check the science that the nuclear industry itself has spent much time attempting to refute. You will find it's been peer reviewed and constructed using using U.S government standards for industrial process measurement. So until you come up with a better argument, then this one alone is enough to reveal any further investment in commercial nuclear power as pointless as we will leave a radionuclide legacy for future generations the way we were left a carbon legacy by previous generations. We simply have to find a way to do it better than nuclear or coal.

(it's largest footprint comes from the concrete used in it's construction) and could be far cheaper if it wasn't severely over-regulated.

So what are you suggesting? Reduce the the ratio of containment volume to thermal power so it is below the design of the AP-1000 which is below that of today's operating PWRs. Further increase risk of containment over-pressurization and failure in event of a severe accident, as if Fukushima never happened?

Over Regulated? The Nuclear Industry *ITSELF* suggested a list of 30 improvements to reactor design which it couldn't afford to implement in the standardised design. It's simply too expensive and Wall street is interested in cost effective solutions like wind and solar that don't require artificial legislative constructs like the Price-Anderson act so they can be insured.

Thorium reactors are also starting to get planned for production and deserve a good look (and if fact a proof of concept plant was built in the past).

So we trade Plutonium-239 for Thallium-208 another gamma emmiter - very nasty stuff to deal with - very hard to deal with and still no idea what to do with the 70,000 tons of pu-239 we have.

Thorium reactors have the green advantages of nuclear reactors and should be included.

It's time to get real about getting green and put the likes of Greenpeace out to pasture. They have done far more harm to the environment than just about anyone short of the Koch brothers.

Except Nuclear reactors have no green advantage. Groupthink is a cancer, no matter the group, no matter the think. It's a result of the very social proof your signature rallies against but comments like this quite clearly demonstrate you have become a victim to. With respect, I would seriously consider synthesising new opinions based on real information and reasoning.

Re:Logic!

[Kazoo the Clown]

Isn't this essentially a "well, they do it too, so it's OK" excuse? Also, such comparisons ignore the potential for additional nuclear pollution due to problems with the handling of spent fuel. In any event, I don't want fossil fuel OR nuclear, none of those are low enough polluting for me. So comparisons of coal to nuclear are irrelevant.

Re:Logic!

[MrKaos]

Lowest pollution? I guess little things like Windscale, Tchernobyl, and Fuckushima are removed from that calculation...

Nope. Go ahead and include them. You'll get to about .1% of the emissions of coal power plants with every nuclear disaster. Ever. Including all of the nuclear bomb tests, the two bombs we dropped on Japan, three mile island, and more.

You have completely and utterly mis-represented the entire S.A article. The comparison was between a functioning NPP and CFG of the same capacity. The figures come from the NRC standards for release of radionuclides from an operational reactor. Nuclear power plants release noble gasses roughly every two weeks, which whilst benign when released, decay into deadlier elements, and thats NRC standard operating procedure for all nuclear plants *before* we start talking about unintentional or unauthorised radioactive effluent emmissions, especially disasters.

Fun fact: Coal plants collectively emit more radiation in a year than all those disasters combined have, and that's when you include into the figures the yearly radiation the nuclear plants emit into the environment as well.

Did you actually read the article you linked to? It mentioned nothing about those disasters at all. Here is the clarification printed at the end of the article;

As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.

Nuclear waste, it's storage and releases into the environment are a problem so staggering that National Geographic describes as "a mythical train that would reach around the Equator and then some" (it's in the first page of ten). Check it out it will give you some idea of the actual size of this problem.

Coal: Because glowing green is fun.

However, Cherenkov radiation is blue.

Re:Logic!

[serviscope_minor]

I am talking about the nuclear reactor at Windscale that suffered a containment breach and 3-day fire in its reactor core in 1957. Look it up sometime.

That's what I did look up and already know about. It was never a nuclear power plant, it was a reactor built soley for making plutonium out of uranium. The fact that you claim that it is not the nuclear fuel factory means you have no idea what you are talking about since it was, in fact, the nuclear fuel factory.

So basially, including Windscale as a statistic for nuclear power is an outright lie since the fire happened at a fuel plant for bomb making, not a power plant.

Re:Logic!

[AmiMoJo]

You are comparing the volume of material, not the amount of radiation people living near the plant are exposed to. Both are bad but the GP specifically said "Coal plants collectively emit more radiation in a year than all those disasters combined", which isn't true.

Re:Logic!

[ElSergio]

Not many have been made so by any form of power. Recent studies show that more health issues were caused by the stress of MOVING people out of the area of Chernobyl, than ever would have statistically died from cancer than had they stayed there. Radiation is highly sensationalized, and poorly represented in the media and in politics. I wish more people had a better understanding of how it worked.

Re:Logic!

[ElSergio]

Thank you! It is nice to see someone else who has a realistic grasp of radiation! I wish more people would take the time to educate themselves with real science. For those of you who are NOT physicists (I am), I recommend reading the sections on energy, and radiation in "Physics for Future Presidents" I would say the author does a pretty good job of laying it out without using heavy science.

Re:Logic!

[angel'o'sphere]

Coal power plants also release far more pollution and for the ignorant they also result in a lot of radiation being released into the air.
That is an urban legend or a /. myth and got debunked 100 times already. Google is your friend!

Nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest pollution, best carbon footprint of anything we have (it's largest footprint comes from the concrete used in it's construction)
That is nonsense as well, the largest footprint comes from mining and transportation and refining and reprocessing the fuel.

Re:Logic!

[angel'o'sphere]

Fun fact: Coal plants collectively emit more radiation in a year than all those disasters
Neither it is fun nor a fact. It is simply wrong.
With emitting the lay mean means: it goes uncontrolled into the environment, polluting it and is in same way dangerous for the population.
Coal plants do not emit any radiation in that sense. All the "radioactive" stuff is in the ash, which is usually safely deposited away. In other words that is no "emission".

Re:Logic!

[angel'o'sphere]

The mine fires are there because there is coal. Not because there are "coal plants".
Most mine fires are "natural".

Re:Logic!

[angel'o'sphere]

There are differences in "radiation" which obviously escapes your grasp.

The wildlife is still quite happy living in and around every nuclear disaster site No it is not. it is recovering very slowly around Chernobyl in the recent years (which is roughly 30 years after the disaster).

some of the dumber people imagine mutating...)
So you never saw the mutations after Chernobyl? Wow, and you feel qualified to comment here? Pfftt ... you are ridiculous.

Re: Logic!

[angel'o'sphere]

Uranium mine are bigger ... idiot.
Most coal is mined below the earth not in an open pit ...

Re:Logic!

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry, you are an idiot.

Coal never has emitted any significant amount of uranium into the atmosphere.

The majority of radioactive material in coal ends up in the ash, and always did so, and in a modern plant that is not the majority but 100%.

Re:Logic!

[angel'o'sphere]

There was no regulation that required them to have the emergency generators at a "safer place".

And this earthquake /. myth goes meanwhile on my nerves. Fukushima was 450 miles away from the quake.

It only got hit by the tsunami ... and it lost its connection to the grid due to the quake (and could not cool itself because it depended on the grid for power)

Re:Logic!

[angel'o'sphere]

Nuclear generation has a ramp up time to respond to basload conditions. Baseload power is a function of the grid, not of a single form of generation. Solar Thermal is responsive for baseload and wind is more scaleable than nuclear or coal.

That is so wrong ... it is beyond believe.
Baseload power is the amount you _always_ feed into the grid regardless of demand.
it is not a "function" of the grid, except that every "national" grid has a slightly different "base load".
In germany "base load" is roughly 40% of peak load. And that means: at night around 4:00 base load is _higher_ than demand. How does that work? The extra power fed in is pumped up into pumped storage plants.

Re:Logic!

[The Grim Reefer]

The mine fires are there because there is coal. Not because there are "coal plants". Most mine fires are "natural".

A natural mine? Mine fires are there because coal is mined for burning. Coal seam fires are a different matter. Even so, it still shows that coal is not as benevolent compared to uranium as many seen to think. When's the last time there was a natural nuclear explosion on this planet?

Re:Logic!

[MrKaos]

Nuclear generation has a ramp up time to respond to baseload conditions. Baseload power is a function of the grid, not of a single form of generation. Solar Thermal is responsive for baseload and wind is more scaleable than nuclear or coal.

That is so wrong ... it is beyond believe.

There are three sentences there, I presume you disagree with "Baseload power is a function of the grid, not of a single form of generation." which answers "Strident hyperbole with regards to the anti-nuclear energy has resulted in the real world build of coal power plants as renewals simply are suitable for baseline power."

Baseload power is the amount you _always_ feed into the grid regardless of demand. it is not a "function" of the grid, except that every "national" grid has a slightly different "base load".

What you say is from the perspective of the power plant, not from the consumer who doesn't care what percentage of peak load, base load is. What they care about is "availability" of electricity, which is generally how the term "baseload" is (incorrectly) used. Maybe I should have pointed that out however I was too tired.

In the context of your statement I understand what you are saying however, the OP means something different as the statement intends to say renewable energy sources are not suitably available for on-demand supply. What I am asserting is that the availability of electricity is a function of the grid that connect various sources to consumers.

Re:Logic!

[AmiMoJo]

Wrong on both counts. The regulator told them that they needed to make the generator room flood proof, and they were required to act on that information. They didn't but the regulator was slow to do anything about it.

The earthquake damaged the cooling system. This was not known at the time of the disaster which is why it doesn't seem to be widely known, but was discovered a few months afterwards. Even without the tsunami there would have been problems in at least one reactor.

NHK did a very informative series of documentaries on this subject that I recommend you watch.

Re:Logic!

[angel'o'sphere]

What I am asserting is that the availability of electricity is a function of the grid that connect various sources to consumers.
Yeah but this is wrong as well.
Perhaps the "customers" should simply stop caring and let the grid operators generate the power in what ever way they want?
It is not YOUR problem if MY grid consists ONLY of wind and solar and pumped storage plants.

The actual transformations happening in germany perfectly show that this absolutely possible.

Re:Logic!

[angel'o'sphere]

Strictily speaking 3 Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima where no "nuclear explosions".

How many "natural" reactor "melt downs" we had I don't know but we have a few sites on earth where a "natural" reactor was running for a few thousand or few hundred years.

My point was: even if we have artificial mine fires which we can not stop, we also have natural ones. It is an inherent problem with having coal veins reaching the top of the earth.

What about

[rossdee]

Geothermal ? Theres plenty of energy there...

Re:What about

[pixelpusher220]

Geothermal and Solar have basically the same problem. Quite plentiful, way more than we'll ever use until we become truly space going (centuries) but dispersed enough that gathering and storing it becomes impractical.

The main problem with renewable sources isn't the availability, it's the storage for later use. Coal/oil/uranium already have this part solved by nature, though with all the downsides that go with them. Dams solve the storage issue for hydro, but can't really be built in many more places than they are already and have their own negatives as well.

Re:What about

[MightyMartian]

I was going to say the same thing.

The problem here, I suspect, is not that renewables are insufficient to our energy needs, it's that they are often not available in jurisdictionally convenient places. Iceland likely has geothermal capacity great enough to power a goodly chunk of Europe, but it's stuck in the middle of the North Atlantic, which means there cost of building and maintaining transmission capacity is very large.

The same applies where I am in British Columbia. The north coast of BC has huge geothermal potential, but no one wants to put up the capital. The government will bow who knows how much money making massive upgrades to transmission lines to isolated places like Kitimat to produce LNG, which will have to be supplied by the rest of the grid (read: electricity ratepayers and taxpayers) but won't investigate in any meaningful way geothermal capacity that could once again make BC a frequent net exporter of electricity.

Re:What about

[fustakrakich]

In the battles amongst the great empires, geothermal holds no strategic value.

Re:What about

[amorsen]

Geothermal ? Theres plenty of energy there...

No. No there is not. Geothermal flux is measured in mW per m2. Yes there are local exceptions like Iceland, but if you tried to produce sufficient energy for hundreds of millions of people, you would find the hot spots going cool very quickly.

Re:What about

[chmod a x mojo]

Umm. No.

The reason is quite simply we don't have the technology to reach the gradients worth tapping since most of the areas with a high enough accessible geothermal gradient are national parks ( U.S. anyways). If we could drill to 9-12km we could literally power the entire U.S. with the geothermal gradient of one western state. It then becomes a simpler problem of updating the infrastructure for distribution.

As for the cooling of hot springs, the amount of heat removed is so insignificant as to be immeasurable. You lose more heat to the surrounding crust than what can be extracted for power production. Even with removing 40-60C from water and pumping it back it will barely affect the temp of magma chambers (generally many km^3 ) / geothermal gradients (pretty much the same temp around the globe at the same depths) by 0.0000000001C or less / year.

Re:What about

[green is the enemy]

I kind of see the point the article is making. It is not actually impossible to use all renewables for energy, but it is land intensive and more expensive than necessary. We do something else that is land intensive: farming.

Unlike farming, energy generation can be done at a high density using nuclear power. That is really economically advantageous and hard to ignore. I think it makes sense to pursue three broad energy technology categories: (1) nuclear, (2) solar & wind, (3) storage, like pumped hydro. Nuclear would be used for reliable constant energy supply. Solar (mostly residential PV and desert solar farms) & wind would generate cheap extra energy that would mostly be used by customers that can time their energy use to when it is most abundant. Pumped storage would be used to buy energy during low demand and sell it back during high demand in the 24-hour cycle, absorbing some of the energy from renewables and allowing nuclear to operate at full capacity 24/7. To account for seasonal and weather related variation, extra generation capacity will be installed. For the even rarer cases of capacity shortfall, chemical fueled (most likely methane) power stations would come online.

These technologies should allow us to economically stop using fossil fuels for energy. The only missing piece is how to power vehicles: batteries? synthesized fuel (from CO2 and water)?

Re:What about

[amorsen]

One km^3 of basalt rock has a mass of 3 Gt or 3Pg. Specific heat capacity is 0.8J/gK, so we get 2.4PJ/K for 1 km^3, or 150PJ for a delta of 60K. Denmark uses 26GW of power on average, so 150PJ is gone in slightly more than 2 months, assuming 100% efficiency. If you wanted to power the entire world (16 TW), you would get less than 3 hours out of one km^3 of rock. Note that the rock replenishes heat at the mW/m2 rate that I mentioned before; practically zero, and therefore geothermal is not sustainable/renewable.

Transferring the power is difficult, as you would have to convert it to electricity, and thermodynamic efficiency is lousy if the temperature delta is low.

Re:What about

[chmod a x mojo]

I'm not going to argue with you on your math since it is a sunday night and I have been drinking... but I will point out several things.

One, for specifics, I was talking about the continental U.S. which is comprised mostly of granitic, not basaltic rock (or we would be sitting quite a bit lower than we are), hence the larger geothermal gradient in the west where the the pacific plate is subducting under the N.A. plate.

And two, when I say geothermal gradient at depths of 9km+ we are talking at least 400-600C at ~40,600km by ~2,900km as a heat sink ( circumference by depth to core mantle boundary ) as a heatsink. As you go deeper you also get hotter adding to your available heatsink.

If you think we are going to cool the crust, lithosphere, and mantle to the core in a few short years you may want to check your math again. We would be hard pressed to remove as much heat in a year as a volcano does in one single eruption....

Re:What about

[pixelpusher220]

The only positive about nuclear is the lack of CO2 emissions. That's it. It has all the other downsides of a fossil fuel, i.e. mining and transportation of fuel to plant, etc. And of course the radiation issues 'when' something fails. Oh and that whole proliferation of fissile material thing (at least for the uranium/plutonium techs).

For the next century or so nuclear is likely the only feasible solution to maintain our modern society and combat global warming. but once energy storage tech is brought up to grid scale, nuclear will fade away to niche use at best since buildings simply sitting there will be collecting all the energy you'll ever need.

Re:What about

[dave420]

The mining and transportation is miniscule in comparison. Plus coal plants dump more than just CO2 into the atmosphere, such as radioactive material in rather large quantities. Most nuclear plants have not failed, so your use of "when" is slightly strange.

Re:What about

[pixelpusher220]

I think you missed a key factor..but it's ok, it's night time and kinda dark...

Re:What about

[pixelpusher220]

So you're argument for nuclear is that other methods of power generation also release radioactive waste? just wow.

As I said, the 'only' positive for nuclear is the lack of CO2 release - and you apparently agree.

How about Fukushima where 10 of thousands of people have had to abandon their homes for going on 2 years? Chernobyl? 'when' they fail, it's catastrophic for decades if not centuries. And that doesn't even deal with the storage of nuclear waste for centuries - something we haven't all proven we can do safely.

The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[NicBenjamin]

1) Expense. nuclear power is incredibly expensive to do safely, because if bad things happen at a nuclear plant nobody can ever live in that County ever again. Just look at Fukishima and Chernobyl. If bad things happen at a coal or gas plant, OTOH, the worst consequence is that it blows and you need to buy a new one. You need lots of very smart people to monitor it 24/7, and sophisticated computerized systems and robots to make sure the people don't screw up, and even that won't save you forever.

2) If every democracy uses uses nuclear power everyone else will want it. And if you have a nuclear plant you have most of the really hard bits of a nuclear weapons program. Untrustworthy countries who probably shouldn't have the temptation of city-vaporizing weapons will want them. And it's kinda hard to convince an Iranian who thinks his country is perfectly trustworthy (to him it's those nasty Israelis you have to worry about) that everyone's life would be so much easier if his country didn't have the physical capability to finish the Holocaust. It's even harder to convince the Israelis, who (probably) currently have nuclear weapons, that everyone's lives would be so much simpler if they just switched to solar.

In other words if the choices are one or two more degrees of global warming, or letting every country in the world develop nuclear power, we're probably better off living with the warming.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[dnaumov]

2) If every democracy uses uses nuclear power everyone else will want it. And if you have a nuclear plant you have most of the really hard bits of a nuclear weapons program. Untrustworthy countries who probably shouldn't have the temptation of city-vaporizing weapons will want them. And it's kinda hard to convince an Iranian who thinks his country is perfectly trustworthy (to him it's those nasty Israelis you have to worry about) that everyone's life would be so much easier if his country didn't have the physical capability to finish the Holocaust. It's even harder to convince the Israelis, who (probably) currently have nuclear weapons, that everyone's lives would be so much simpler if they just switched to solar.

In other words if the choices are one or two more degrees of global warming, or letting every country in the world develop nuclear power, we're probably better off living with the warming.

This is one of the shittiest arguments ever. Out of all countries with nuclear capability, US happens to be the only one who has actually used nuclear weapons against another country. Additionally, the US has started several new wars in the past decade alone. So if we go along with your "trustworthy" line of reasoning, the US should be #1 on the list of countries to be denied any access to nuclear technology.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[NicBenjamin]

That's kind of my point.

If the country that helped defeat but the Nazis and the Soviets can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, why the fuck would we insist that all 54 African countries, everyone in Latin America, Asia, etc. has to build reactors capable of producing those weapons? Hell if the Japanese, who aren't known for inferior engineering, can't keep a non-weapons producing facility safe what are the odds that everyone else can pull that shit off?

Global warming is bad, but if it's a choice between moving all NYC residents to Detroit (we'd actually have room for a quarter of them within the Detroit city limits, the D' population has fallen that much since it's peak in '55), and giving all 192 countries in the world nuclear power then I'm gonna go with moving everyone to fucking Detroit.

This's one of the dumbest proposals ever.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[pixelpusher220]

I'm with you on the downsides of nuclear, but given the projected sea level rise, the cost of the warming is going to be much much worse than a few nuclear plants going boom. Flooding out the coast lines worldwide will displace far more people than even if all the nuke plants went FUBAR.

We probably need nuclear for the next 50-100 years at least until we can get the energy storage technology ramped up enough for grid scale usage of renewable sources.

Thorium nuclear has lots of potential as well, without the proliferation aspects. That needs lots of R & D before being usable too though.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[NicBenjamin]

There are many nuclear reactor designs that are not usable for development of nuclear weapons. Plus the whole "thorium" thing cannot be used for nukes either.

That's possible. OTOH if you were actually serious about convincing people to adopt these proposals you wouldn't call it nuclear power, because people who don't follow the issue closely assume all nuclear reactors produce weapons-grade material. You'd call it Thorium-based Fission.

Moreover it doesn't get around problem one: namely that even with Japanese-quality safety engineers a really bad accident can ruin hundreds of square miles of your country.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[amorsen]

Plus the whole "thorium" thing cannot be used for nukes either.

Sure it can. You can fairly trivially produce and separate Uranium 233 if you have a thorium fuel cycle running. It is an unusual choice for nuclear bombs, but perfectly suitable.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[Mr D from 63]

Nuclear is very expensive to build, but overall cost including fuel, waste, O&M and regulation is very competitive. You can look at states or countries....power prices are lower where there is nuclear baseload. There is a marginal profit line today though, as natural gas has eroded that in recent years. Nat Gas is very low cost today, and the gas companies will keep it low until their is a greater dependency.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[GarethIwanFairclough]

1) Expense. nuclear power is incredibly expensive to do safely, because if bad things happen at a nuclear plant nobody can ever live in that County ever again. Just look at Fukishima and Chernobyl. If bad things happen at a coal or gas plant, OTOH, the worst consequence is that it blows and you need to buy a new one. You need lots of very smart people to monitor it 24/7, and sophisticated computerized systems and robots to make sure the people don't screw up, and even that won't save you forever.

2) If every democracy uses uses nuclear power everyone else will want it. And if you have a nuclear plant you have most of the really hard bits of a nuclear weapons program. Untrustworthy countries who probably shouldn't have the temptation of city-vaporizing weapons will want them. And it's kinda hard to convince an Iranian who thinks his country is perfectly trustworthy (to him it's those nasty Israelis you have to worry about) that everyone's life would be so much easier if his country didn't have the physical capability to finish the Holocaust. It's even harder to convince the Israelis, who (probably) currently have nuclear weapons, that everyone's lives would be so much simpler if they just switched to solar.

In other words if the choices are one or two more degrees of global warming, or letting every country in the world develop nuclear power, we're probably better off living with the warming.

"Fastest way to build a bomb is to just build a bomb."

I wish I knew who said that.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[AmiMoJo]

Nuclear isn't cheap, it just moves much of the cost from people's energy bills into general taxation. The government pays for insurance since no commercial insurance company would every fully insure a nuclear plant. Then you have waste disposal, security and so forth.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[BlueTemplar]

The overwhelming majority of nuclear reactors in France are "old style" nuclear reactors. The only reason why Fukushima happened in Japan and not in France is because France is lot less likely to have a high magnitude quake followed by a tsunami.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[Mr D from 63]

Nuclear isn't cheap, it just moves much of the cost from people's energy bills into general taxation. The government pays for insurance since no commercial insurance company would every fully insure a nuclear plant. Then you have waste disposal, security and so forth.

All those costs are certainly included.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[HiThere]

There may be types of nuclear plant that can't produce weapons grade materials, pebble bed reactors come to mind as a possibility, but Thorium isn't a magic wand in *this* context. It can be used to produce weapons grade materials. If it can't, that's because the plant was designed so that it couldn't, not because of the starting material. U233 is sufficiently radioactive for an explosive weapon.

For that matter, even if you can't produce a nuclear explosion, you could use ground up radioactive dust combined with a conventional explosive to render quite a large area uninhabitable. Or, if you so desired, a smaller area, down to the size of only a room (though that could probably be cleaned up).

OTOH, some people fly off the handle. Areas contaminated by radiation aren't permanently uninhabitable. The most radioactive materials have short half lives. After a few decades it would be fairly safe, and after a few centuries it would approach the background level. No people may live in the vicintiy of Chernobyl, but lots of large mammals do. (Well, people live longer, and are also more aware of the danger. But the animals do live and breed there, and have for many generations now.)

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[cartman]

1) Expense. nuclear power is incredibly expensive to do safely

Nuclear power is not incredibly expensive to do safely. New nuclear power plants are far safer than those a Fukushima and would not have melted down under those circumstances. They cost modestly more than coal-burning.

And if you have a nuclear plant you have most of the really hard bits of a nuclear weapons program.

This is not true at all. Nuclear reactors are not helpful in gaining a nuclear weapons program.

It's uranium enrichment that helps with a nuclear weapons program. However there is already an international treaty whereby any one of seven countries will provide any other country with a 30-year stockpile of nuclear fuel if that country wishes to pursue nuclear power. As a result, it is not necessary to enrich uranium in order to have nuclear power. As a result, it's entirely possible to separate nuclear power from nuclear weapons.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[HiThere]

Umnh....did you mean:

All those costs are certainly included in the subsidy.

because, if so, I agree with you.

OTOH, it's also true that there are large subsidies for both coal and gas/oil. It's not clear to me which has the larger subsidy. What is the value of being relieved of all liability for faults in an item which has the potential to kill millions of people and to render many 10's of square miles uninhabitable, and all the materials on them likewise? It may never happen. But it might. That's got to count as a quite substantial subsidy, but it's hard to figure just how large without really knowing the probabilities of all the possible scenarios. It may well be that nuclear has a much higher subsidy than does oil. Or it may be much lower. (Oils subsidy, remember, includes a substantial presence in the middle east of the US military.)

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[Nemyst]

It's amusing because you've perfectly repeated the myths that are constantly being trotted out against nuclear. Let's break them down.

1.a. Nuclear is expensive, there's no denying it, but well-designed, modern nuclear power plants can last for decades. Some designs can even run for decades off the same fuel! Compared with many other techs, nuclear is taking the "long view" approach to power generation.

1.b. Safety in a nuclear power plant isn't the most expensive thing, really. Just about every nuclear incident can be attributed to utter and complete negligence or downright wilful disregard of safety.

The Chernobyl incident was a result of an experiment taking place: before it had even begun, a series of problems and errors caused the reactor to malfunction (but not yet in any dangerous manner). The operators decided to press on, manually overriding many safety measures, ignoring the numerous alarms warning of abnormal parameters and forcing the reactor to a certain thermal level which was still below the minimum safe level for the experiment. When the experiment started with all of these problems, and due to the design's positive void coefficient, the reactor entered a positive feedback loop which caused the explosion. The aftermath was worsened by the political context; the operator and later the government did not want to be shown wrong, and thus they hid information or convinced themselves that things were not as bad as they were (for instance, the operator thought the reactor was intact despite graphite and fuel pieces lying in the building, despite all the dosimeters reading "off-scale", etc.). Many people died as a result, wearing no protection and taking no precautions.

The Fukushima incident was largely a result of corner-cutting. TEPCO repeatedly ignored problems with the plant's design, even going as far as falsifying safety reports. A study warning of issues with the plant's safety with regards to tsunamis was also ignored. Moreover, TEPCO and the Japanese government were extremely slow to react and communicate, again attempting to save face by not reporting the problems as they were but instead trying to minimize the dangers and issues until they were no longer able to hide them. Despite this, no deaths have been registered that were linked to the reactor's leak thus far. It's hard to find reliable numbers for estimates of long-term (cancer, etc.) death rates, but they seem to hover between 100 and 1000. Let's keep in mind that all of this happened through a magnitude 9 earthquake followed by a tsunami with waves as high as 40 meters that killed nearly 16,000 people.

Now, if we were to build new reactors, we'd have a few advantages. Most notably, modern designs completely side-step the notion a positive feedback loop and should be able to withstand complete coolant failure without meltdown. Note that I'm not saying they're perfect: we need to do more tests, but this will require funding and an actual political movement towards nuclear. It can be made safe and extremely resilient to human error, but not without appropriate oversight and research. China, India and others are already following this path due to their increasing energy demands.

2. Not necessarily. As you've said, nuclear is costly, which is a strong deterrent for any area which has another reliable energy source (be it solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc.) available at a cheaper up-front cost (even if the running costs may be higher). Furthermore, many technologies related to nuclear power do not lead into weapons and cannot transition into being used for weapons. If they can make the leap from, say, thorium to nuclear weapons, they could've made the leap from nothing to nuclear weapons too. Plus, as it is right now, you're basically saying that the West should have the ability to deny other countries access to a very powerful and efficient energy source all because we got there first.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[HiThere]

Trustworth? Yeah, the US is trustworthy. The question is do you want them to do what you can trust them to do.

Actually, looked at from a historical perspective, the US has been extremely moderate for to top country with no real competition. The Romans were a lot worse. And don't talk about the Assyrians. OTOH, Egypt was probably no worse than the US. (It was another commercial empire. That may have something to do with it.)

I'm not considering Britain, as I don't feel I have sufficient historical perspective on the British empire. My impression, as a US citizen, is that it was worse than the US, but only slightly. And even that could be wrong.

OTOH, typically as a country starts on its way down from the top, it's behavior starts to degenerate. So I wouldn't expect things to stay stable. I expect US behavior to get worse both internationally and domestically. The real question is "How will China react", as that will have a large effect on the US actions. (If for no other reason, they own much of the government...indirectly, I think. [I.e., via lobbyists operated by corporations largely owned by Chinese nationals, or even directly by the government.])

FWIW, I consider China to be the dominant country in the world today, but playing a very low-key background game, and using other countries as catspaws to do things they don't want to get blamed for.

OTOH, also consider that a lot of US military action is designed to test out weapons to control a hostile population with a small number of men. And also note that many US police departments have started to use drones. I'm sure that many countries are watching how this develops with great interest.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[Mr D from 63]

All those costs are certainly included in the subsidy

What specifically, are you talking about when you say "the subsidy"? There is no subsidy that covers all those costs described. Any federal assistance to the nuclear industry is mostly covered by fees. Any "tax' money used for nuclear pales in comparison to the tax revenues generated by the industry. Please explain exactly what subsidies you are referring to.

"potential to kill millions" is irrational fear. Even in the worst events that have occurred, we have seen nothing of the sort. Fear should not drive the debate, facts should.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[NicBenjamin]

Even assuming you're right about the long-term expenses and safety of a nuclear plant, there's the minor problem of what to do with the nuclear waste when you're done with it. Yucca Mountain would have been great, if it had any chance in hell of getting re-started.

As for "only the West can have nice things," I'm not arguing we should keep using nuclear. We have some plants set up we should probably continue to use, but the Africans/Latin Americans/etc. would be much better off building something else. Damn near anything else. Solar would be great in the Sahara. Hydroelectric would be good in the Congo river basin. I don't like coal in general, but South Africa has plenty of it.

I'm sure somebody will try a nuclear plant. I hope they use one of the ones that is hard to weaponize, and I really hope they don't hand ANY of the contracts over to some guy who happens to be an important Minister's cousin. Because fucking up nuclear power is not like fucking up a website, it cannot be fixed by simply delaying the project six months.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[amorsen]

Well, the US built some and tested them. I doubt they had an unmanned fuel-processing factory at the time.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[citizenr]

1) Expense. nuclear power is incredibly expensive to do safely, because if bad things happen at a nuclear plant nobody can ever live in that County ever again. Just look at Fukishima and Chernobyl

1 Fukushima and Chernobyl are not countries
2 Chernobyl is being repopulated, it started 5-7 years ago. it is SAFE to live there.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[imikem]

How exactly is a nuclear power plant supposed to kill millions of people? It's pretty hard for me to imagine any incident worse than Chernobyl, and nobody I am aware of aside from maybe some ancient alien believers has put anywhere near that death toll on it. Hint: it would be pretty hard to make a nuclear reactor explode like a fission bomb, and even if it did, to get to "millions" dead you probably need to go with a thermonuclear detonation.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[imikem]

Except that nobody has managed to do it. India managed a .2 kt fizzle. The US got a limited success, but it was using a part plutonium pit. Also U-233 has a critical mass something like 50% higher than plutonium, so probably pretty easy to for inspectors to detect.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[stiggle]

Fossil fuels seem to be doing a pretty good job of working towards killing millions and rendering millions of square miles uninhabitable. Where do you think all this man-made climate change has come from? Fossil fuels.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[HiThere]

Chernobyl isn't close to the worst It may be the worst likely, but that's not what needs to be covered. (If you have 1% chance of an accident in a year, an accident is unlikely. Unless you have more than 50 independent operations.)

There are nuclear plant close enough to New York, IIRC, so that if there were an accident only slightly worse than Chernobyl, and the wind was wrong, New York would become uninhabitable for decades. Including all the infrastructure. If the company hid the problems, or the engineers were swamped by too many alarms that they were trying to figure out, people living nearby might get a lethat in 10 years (est. avg.) dose before anyone knew what was going on. Etc. Unlikely, definitely. But plants are continually failing safety inspections, and being certified to run at higher power levels beyond their original design life. So as the number of plants increases, the probability of a really serious accident increases. A typical city has hundreds of thousands of people, but a megalopolitan area has millions...though I'll grant you actually killing those millions is unlikely...at least not quickly. (I tend to include people killed by radiation induced cancer as casualties of the radiation. So what I was thinking about was not an explosion (well, not more than a steam explosion), but a massive leak of particulate waste that drifted over the environs and exposed people without their even knowing there was a problem. And yes, this *IS* a worst case scenario. But given enough plants and enough time it will happen. Being unlikely doesn't mean it won't happen. Giant Meteor strikes are unlikely, but they have happened.

OTOH, I am clearly no expert. But failed safety inspections that are also failed on reinspection mean to me that the expert assurances of safety aren't really believable. Remember, they have a vested interest, but also they've been taught by people with a vested interest. I think they are honest, well-intentioned people (well, most of them), who don't like to think about bad things happening, so they don't. (And, yes, there are exceptions.) And they don't want you to make their job harder, so even if they see a problem, they'll try to say something that will calm you (i.e., the public) down more than explain a difficult to understand methodology. And when they're right, this is a reasonable way to proceed. It gets things done with the least effort and strain, and fewer outside overseers jostling their elbows. But if they aren't right, things don't work out so well.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[HiThere]

I've got to agree with that. But I *do* believe that if there were the political will behind it, solar, wind, etc. would replace fossil fuels...particularly if they received the level of subsidy that oil/gas/coal currently receives. OTOH, it does still require some technical innovations to really be viable. A switch made at the current level of technology would raise prices by perhaps 50%...either that or yield some *very* unreliable sources of energy.

OTOH, 5-10 years ago it would have doubled the cost of energy. So that's a moving target. If it keeps on it's current curve, then in 5-10 years solar/wind/etc. will be cheaper than oil/gas/coal.

The real problem is that even if we stopped using fossil fuels totally today, lags in the system would guarantee that global warming would continue for at least another few decades, and I don't see any reason to believe that it would cool down again after it stabilized. When the ice is off the Arctic, then there's a lot more sunlight being absorbed, and carbon dioxide lasts millenia...and it's not just in the air, a lot of it has been absorbed by the ocean.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[NicBenjamin]

I didn't call Fukishima/Chernobyl countries, I called them counties. I'm pretty sure I'm technically wrong to call them counties, because I'm pretty sure Ukraine and Japan don't actually have counties. What I meant was that a relatively large area around the plant is uninhabitable, and the area within is comparable to a US County. In Michigan, for example, almost every county is a 30 mile square for 900 sq mi. the Chernobyl exclusion zone is 1000 sq mi. Fukishima's seems to be significantly smaller, but is still a hundred or so square miles.

You're wrong about Chernobyl's population. The Exclusion Zone still has no legal residents, and the illegal settler population has been on the decline for years. Scientists are saying that the disaster has been a boon to local wildlife, due to the fact that human neighbors are a lot more deadly for large mammals then mere radiation; but nobody is legally allowed to live there yet.

Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution....

[angel'o'sphere]

2 Chernobyl is being repopulated, it started 5-7 years ago. it is SAFE to live there.
That is wrong.
It is not repopulated.
Perhaps it is safe to live there, but it is not safe to eat any food produced in the region. As a big part of the population where farmers they have nothing to live on their.
Also most towns are deteriorated ... so to settle there again they have to rebuild.
Rebuilding will OTOH again be a radiation problem as they have to dig in the ground and create radioactive dust.

Easy for them to say

[Anonymous Coward]

Five nuclear power plants in the US have closed this year, due to a combination of competitive and operating issues. An industry analyst quoted in the article expects more plant closures to come.

Now we're stuck with these decommissioned plants. Anybody want a high-paying job? Sign up to help clean up and tear down those zombie plants.

Re:Easy for them to say

[rasmusbr]

Yes, before we make (implicit) claims about nuclear being able to scale, maybe we should prove that we can decommission the 300 or so ones that are due to close over the next two decades.

Next problem: while doing that, build 150 new plants (each twice as powerful) to replace the ones going out of service.

Next problem: while doing all of the above, build more plants, i.e. the actual scaling...

Meanwhile the amount of installed PV capacity on the planet is doubling each two years on average. Those are probably also going to be a recycling nightmare, but at least they allow us to kick the can another 30 years down the proverbial road.

Re:Easy for them to say

[NoKaOi]

Yes, before we make (implicit) claims about nuclear being able to scale, maybe we should prove that we can decommission the 300 or so ones that are due to close over the next two decades.

No, we're talking about building new plants, which means new designs, not old ones. So, we have to prove that building a plant with a new design and operating a new design and decommissioning a new design is more cost effective and environmentally friendly than coal, gas, oil, the wars we're fighting because of oil, the overall economic impacts of sending more money out of the country to buy oil, etc etc.

Meanwhile the amount of installed PV capacity on the planet is doubling each two years on average. Those are probably also going to be a recycling nightmare, but at least they allow us to kick the can another 30 years down the proverbial road.

Um, what? If new nuke plants are built, it's going to be more than 30 years before we need to go down that proverbial road...hypocrite? Don't get me wrong, PV is great, the more the better as far as I'm concerned, but why do you argue against new nuke plants by saying decommissioning will suck in the same post that you say we don't have to worry about PV decommissioning for a few decades so it doesn't matter?

Re:Easy for them to say

[gdshaw]

Five nuclear power plants in the US have closed this year, due to a combination of competitive and operating issues. An industry analyst quoted in the article expects more plant closures to come.

... which shows that gas can undercut nuclear at current prices (and subject to current environmental regulations). So, yes, if you think it is OK to carry on burning fossil fuels, then nuclear power does not make economic sense at the moment. The same goes for wind and solar power in most circumstances.

The case for switching to nuclear and/or renewable power rests on the premise that continued fossil fuel use is not sustainable. Cheap gas prices reflect increased availability of the fuel, but not increased capacity to deal with the resulting CO2 emissions.

Re:Easy for them to say

[AmiMoJo]

Problem is no-one wants to invest money in new nuclear plant designs, unless they are just an incremental improvement that primarily reduces cost. Anything radical means big expense getting it tested and certified, and of course the prospect of unforeseen costs or even complete failure. When you are looking at tens of billions over tens of years just to break even it doesn't look so good.

Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[gweihir]

Why does everybody overlook that uranium resources are limited and that what is available today barely can feed the existing reactors? Money talks is the only explanation I have. Nuclear energy has brought nothing but trouble and wasted shiploads of money.

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Why does everybody overlook that uranium resources are limited and that what is available today barely can feed the existing reactors? Money talks is the only explanation I have.

Breeder reactors solved this a long time ago, before enriching uranium became practical.

Nuclear energy has brought nothing but trouble and wasted shiploads of money.

Would you prefer more coal plants polluting the air? Hydro-dams preventing fish breeding? Wind turbines slicing birds apart? Every energy-generation system is going to have its drawbacks. Ever play SimCity?

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[amorsen]

If nuclear power plants were cheap, you could extract uranium from sea water and still provide power at competitive prices. Uranium in sea water is an extremely large resource.

Unfortunately nuclear power plants are extremely expensive to build, and so they would be hopelessly uncompetitive if they had to pay the additional costs of extracting fuel from sea water. As it is, even in the UK, on existing nuclear sites (so approximately no problems with NIMBY), new builds require guaranteed prices way above market rates for 35 years. Even solar can compete with that.

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[jonbryce]

The price of uranium is about $35/lb ($77.16/kg) at the moment, and it costs about $40/lb ($88.18/kg) to produce the stuff at the moment[1]. 1kg of uranium gives you 83TJ of energy, the same as 3464 tonnes of coal. Coal costs $71.34 per tonne[2], so to get the same amount of energy from 1kg of uranium in coal, you would need to spend $247,133.65.

The fact that uranium is currently selling for less than the cost of production suggests that there is a massive surplus of inventory in the channel at the moment, not that resources are limited.

Sources:
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/uranium-is-set-for-a-violent-move-higher-2013-10
2. http://dawn.com/news/1053697/rising-coal-prices-to-hit-profit-margins

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[AmiMoJo]

Unfortunately no-one has been able to build a viable commercial scale breeder reactor. You could try again but good luck getting investment on such a risky prospect.

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[AmiMoJo]

The fact that uranium is currently selling for less than the cost of production suggests that there is a massive surplus of inventory in the channel at the moment

Yes

not that resources are limited.

No. It suggests that no-one wants it because production was at the level required to support all active reactors in the world, but now many of them have been shut down. Japan lost over 50, German is decommissioning all its, the US is closing plants because they are no longer economical. Demand is falling and suppliers have too much capacity. Uranium is expensive to store.

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[cartman]

Why does everybody overlook that uranium resources are limited and that what is available today barely can feed the existing reactors?

Because the claim isn't true.

Nuclear energy has brought nothing but trouble and wasted shiploads of money.

What? Nuclear energy has provided almost 20% of electricity worldwide and has powered entire first-world countries such as France. It has averted millions of deaths (over 30+ years) that would have occurred if we had burned coal instead. Is that really "nothing"? Is it really a waste of money?

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[danlip]

Wind turbines don't "slice up" birds. The blades move far too slowly. Occasionally birds die because they fly into them, but total bird deaths is petty tiny compared to electrical transmission lines, windows, hunting, cats, and just about anything else associated with civilization. Not that they don't have environmental impact, but the environmental costs are all up front. The mining of rare-earth minerals for the magnets is pretty horrid.

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[gweihir]

BS. Breeders are good for one thing: Making bomb material. For everything else, they are a failure.

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[gweihir]

Stop spreading nuclear industry FUD.

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[cartman]

Stop spreading nuclear industry FUD.

What? What I am spreading "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" about? Coal-burning plants? You really think that the fear and doubt about those is overstated?

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[gweihir]

Your whole statement is FUD. Starts with comparing to classical dirty coal only and goes from there. Fundamentally dishonest.

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[angel'o'sphere]

Would you prefer more coal plants polluting the air?
In europe they only emit CO2, hardly a pollution. And with upcoming capturing and sequestering even that might be solveable.
Hydro-dams preventing fish breeding?
They don't, for that you have fish staircases leading around the dam. in europe they are mandatory if you build a new dam, strange that you can't make similar laws.
Wind turbines slicing birds apart? That is nonsense. For splitting them apart the speed of the blade is far to low. Birds get very rarely hit by rotors anyway, or the fields where full with corpses.
Every energy-generation system is going to have its drawbacks. Ever play SimCity?
As far as I remember the biggest drawback was this Godzialla thing :D Now I understand your argumentation ...

Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough

[angel'o'sphere]

Because the claim isn't true.
Ofc it is true! How retarded are you?
The plant has simply just an amount of X and when X is gone we have none anymore. So it is limited.
And for your surprise the amount of years we need to consume the tiny X of uranium we have is surprisingly low! (Read it up yourself ...)

and has powered entire first-world countries such as France.
That is wrong and a /. myth.
France perhaps has 60% nuclear power, roughly 15% - 30% is imported (varies over daytime and season). Like every grid they have about 7% pumped storage capacity (which is needed to be able to follow the load of the grid fine grained) On top of that they a lot of flow water and a few tidal power plants. Also they have an increasing wind and solar fraction.
What I don't know bout YOU can simply look up on the relevant european web sites is how much coal and gas plants they have (as gas plants are also used to fine grained following the load).
It has averted millions of deaths (over 30+ years) By whos statistics? Pfftt ....

Thorium wars

[thej1nx]

Looks like after the oil wars, it might very well soon be India's turn...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Reserve_estimates

Re:Thorium wars

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Don't worry, Murica will liberate India if that happens! We're gonna make the world safe fer democracy and freedom!

Re:Thorium wars

[kyrsjo]

Thorium is pretty abundant, so its probably not worth figthing over. Most countries have access to enough of the stuff.

Re:Thorium wars

[grumling]

'merica has almost as much thorium as India, so no need.

Re:Thorium wars

[ShanghaiBill]

Thorium is pretty abundant, so its probably not worth figthing over. Most countries have access to enough of the stuff.

Furthermore, you don't need much thorium. Uranium is only 0.7% U235. The other 99.3% is U238, which is mostly removed in the enrichment process. But with thorium, you can use all of it as fuel, and it is four times as abundant as uranium to start with. The biggest problem with thorium, is a lack of experience with the reactors. Several small research reactors have been built, but there are no existing, proven designs for big plants. Fortunately, both India and China appear to be getting behind the technology. Lots more info here.

Re:Thorium wars

[delt0r]

Thats pretty dishonest of you. Sure most of uranium is U238, but then *none* of Th232 is U233. *Both* U238 and Th232 are fertile and are not fuel. They both need to used in a breeder reactor. Th232 with neutron breads U233 and U238 with a neutron breads Pt239. The difference is that at least U235 is out there otherwise your really screwed getting the whole thing started.

If your going to compare Uranium reserves to Thorium's, you must consider the U238.

Re:Thorium wars

[cheesybagel]

Not necessarily screwed. There are neutron generators like fusors. You can get neutrons from D-D fusion.

Re:Thorium wars

[delt0r]

Lets start with a simple example. We want 233 grams of 233U. That means we need 1 mole of neutrons. So 6x10^23 neutrons. Now in DD fusion from your fusor example they have 2.45MeV of energy. Lets assume we can wait a year with this thing running and that 100% of the produced neutrons are used breading. That is 7.4kW of neutrons for a whole year. If you and transmute in sane times, you are at power station levels. Fusors would take thousands of years to transmute a single mole.

Re:Thorium wars

[cheesybagel]

So you make a hydrogen bomb. For that you need a trigger. The fact is you can use a small bomb to trigger a larger bomb and the initial trigger can be any powerful enough source of X-rays e.g. Sandia's Z-machine using a small amount of D-D fuel. Then you detonate the bomb inside a cave whose walls are covered in Thorium. The neutrons from the detonation shower the Thorium and transmute it into 233U. I suspect that would not take that much time to do.

IANAP

Re:Thorium wars

[cheesybagel]

I also seem to remember someone proposing to use a cyclotron a long time ago. Not cheap either. Then again if the cycle is self-sustaining in a breeder reactor all you need is your initial set of U-233.

If you want it on the cheap better make it while U-235 and Plutonium stocks last! Heh.

Getting rich from renewable power

[tepples]

Should oil prices rise and remain high, producers of wind turbines, PV panels, solar thermal collectors, storage batteries, and maintenance services for same can get rich.

Re:Getting rich from renewable power

[rally2xs]

If oil prices rise and remain high (how much higher do you want them? They're ALREADY high...), near-universal poverty would reign across the land. Our society runs on cheap energy, and without it, there is not enough life support for everyone at an affordable price. It takes lots of oil to produce the things we need to live, especially food. We need it to work the fields, produce the fertilizer, produce the pesticides so we can eat it instead of the bugs, process it, and transport it. Make that more expensive, and more people are thrown into poverty. Poverty takes somewhere around 6 1/2 years off your life. So, expensive energy is deadly, too.

Regulations are needed

[Joe U]

Nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest pollution, best carbon footprint of anything we have (it's largest footprint comes from the concrete used in it's construction) and could be far cheaper if it wasn't severely over-regulated.

Pure bullshit. Those regulations are there to stop the local energy company from cutting corners and blowing up something. Something that they do on a regular basis in non nuclear energy.

The most dangerous aspect of nuclear energy is the energy company.

Re:Regulations are needed

[Joe U]

I'm not anti-nuke, I'm anti-greed.

I have no (ZERO, None, nada, zilch) issues with nuclear energy as long as it's done properly.

I have major issues with letting companies like ConEd run anything dangerous. They will cut corners to make more money, they will leak radioactive waste into the groundwater, they will eventually cause a disaster. It's in their nature. They need to earn a never ending growing profit, the quick way to that is to cut corners.

So, YES, we must invest in nuclear, but must do it properly.

Re:Regulations are needed

[Joe U]

No, I don't. So stop letting them run them.

Re:Regulations are needed

[Uberbah]

How is it pure bullshit that nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest polution, and best carbon footprint of anything we have, and could be cheaper? Nothing you said is a refutation of that. In fact, the only thing you have said about nuclear energy directly is that the energy company should be regulated due to risk of blowing things up. Well, fucking duh. But that's not a refutation.

It's absolutely a fucking refutation as long as there is profit in nuclear power. When all nuclear power plants are run by the U.S. Navy, then you can talk about how safe it is. Otherwise everything is an expense that can be cut, like cutting back on evacuation drills or removed earthquake sensors, in order to increase profit.

Re:Regulations are needed

[khallow]

It's absolutely a fucking refutation as long as there is profit in nuclear power.

I have a solution. We regulate nuclear power plant operators and you state the fuck away from any decision making authority. "Profit" means the activity is generating net value.

Otherwise everything is an expense that can be cut, like cutting back on evacuation drills or removed earthquake sensors, in order to increase profit.

That's why you have regulation.

Re:Regulations are needed

[Joe U]

I have a better solution. Outlaw nuclear power plant operators and let someone competent like the Navy create a non-profit to run the plants.

Re:Regulations are needed

[Uberbah]

I have a solution. We regulate nuclear power plant operators and you state the fuck away from any decision making authority.
That's why you have regulation.

I have a solution: you put your Randian fantasies aside and deal with real fucking world for once. Both the examples I cited came from regulated, but for-profit, systems. There's also the trivial matter that like most industries (ag, banking, war), the regulatory bodies are made up of former industry executives, and vice versa. Which, as it always does, creates an incestuous relationship as officials emphasize industry profit so they can take profitable positions in the industry when their term is done.

So, again, we can talk about how safe nuclear power is when all profit is removed from the equation, and the plants are run by an organization with a real safety record.

Re:Regulations are needed

[Raenex]

as long as it's done properly

Therein lies the problem. Even in the USSR, where profits shouldn't have been an overriding concern, they screwed it up badly. How can you trust anybody to do it right?

Re:Regulations are needed

[khallow]

Both the examples I cited came from regulated, but for-profit, systems.

Both examples show no problems with privately run nuclear plants. You're wasting my time. But having said that, let me quote relevant parts from the article so that you can see for yourself. From the first article,

At least four years in the works, the changes appear to clash with more recent lessons of last year's reactor crisis in Japan. A mandate that local responders always run practice exercises for a radiation release has been eliminated â" a move viewed as downright bizarre by some emergency planners.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which run the program together, have added one new exercise: More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, state and community police will now take part in exercises that prepare for a possible assault on their local plant.

Sounds dubious, but this isn't a private business running amok, but part of the US federal government who you claim have the "safety record". The NRC and FEMA are not "for profit" systems.

From the second article,

According to the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy (DMME), the Virginia Tech Seismological Observatory (VTSO) removed all seismographs from around the plant in the 1990s due to budget cuts.

The plant owner didn't remove these sensors. Virginia Tech did. And while the article doesn't talk about it, I can think of a very good reason why. Earthquake sensors are far more sensitive these days. You don't need a huge bunch of them just to detect and fix the location of even small earthquakes. And Virginia Tech is not a for profit system.

I find your evidence to be embarrassingly irrelevant to any claim you were trying to make here.

So, again, we can talk about how safe nuclear power is when all profit is removed from the equation, and the plants are run by an organization with a real safety record.

Every operator of a nuclear plant has a safety record. That's one of the purposes of nuclear power regulation. And I wager most of those operators have better safety records than the US Navy.

Re:Regulations are needed

[khallow]

The US Navy and its Soviet counterpart remains the only two entities to have left broken nuclear reactors on the ocean floor (unless someone has since picked them up covertly). The US Navy has two such sunken subs and the Russians appear to have several as well.

While the US Navy's more recent safety record appears much better, one can say the same of most civilian nuclear reactors as well.

Re:Regulations are needed

[Joe U]

The USSR had their share of flaws, some of which don't apply to the US.

Re:Regulations are needed

[Joe U]

While the US Navy's more recent safety record appears much better, one can say the same of most civilian nuclear reactors as well.

Ask the people who have tritium in their water supply about our civilian nuclear reactors.

http://www.ap.org/company/awards/part-ii-aging-nukes

The most recent being this year.

Re:Regulations are needed

[khallow]

Ask the people who have tritium in their water supply about our civilian nuclear reactors.

Even in the absence of nuclear bomb tests and nuclear plants, we would still have tritium in our water supplies from underground radioactive decay, the solar wind, and cosmic rays.

Glancing at your link, it says that the worst contamination was 2 million picocuries per liter of water. According to this link, 10 curies is roughly LD50 (lethal dose where 50% of humans would be expected to die). So right there, we have in the worst contaminated sample, a liter of water has roughly 5 million times below LD50. Even if we were to drink two gallons of that water per day for a century, we're still only up to a bit under 1.5 curies of tritium dose at the end of that century. In practice, since tritium is not selectively absorbed over regular hydrogen, it would settle at the same 2 million picocuries per liter of body water (and corresponding incorporated hydrogen in organic molecules). That just isn't a lot of exposure.

Glancing at the Wikipedia page of the chemical composition of the human body, it appears that the human body has 63% hydrogen by number of atoms. That's very close to water. So long term, a 100 kg adult male drinking 2 million picocurie per liter water exclusively would have roughly 200 million picocuries of tritium in his body at all times. That's 50,000 times lower than the LD50 level. Now, that might contribute some to cancers and other such things, but it's pretty damn small as it is.

The problem here is that dose makes the poison, and there just isn't that much dose. I think it's far less significant here that people are exposed to barely detectable levels of radiation and more important that it demonstrates some degree of minor leaking in the system which could be a problem down the road.

Re:Regulations are needed

[MrKaos]

I ask you the same thing I ask all anti-nukes. If it's good enough to put to sea, then why isn't it good enough to be put on land?

Because military reactors have the budget to run to higher safety standards and are an order of magnitude smaller than a commercial power reactor that is run for a profit.

I think that's what you are getting at.

Re:Regulations are needed

[ElSergio]

Only half true. The regulations exist primary as a way to assuage the uneducated public of the safety of said Nuclear reactors. However, the regulations here in the states force us to use a specific type of nuclear reactor that is one of the least efficient, most polluted, and more unstable. This isn't opinion, it's fact. Do some research into the kind of reactors we use, and the kind that are available, then come talk to me about why that is. I will agree we need regulation, but only regulation that assures the appropriate safeguards, not the require we use unsafe,unclean energy.

Re:What happened

[Smallpond]

What happened to the story about the Obomacare web site I clicked on. Was I imaging it?

That site crashed under the load.

Re:thorium OR ???

[BoRegardless]

For many coastlines, how about deep ocean water currents? Relatively low tech, w/no surface effects. Easy to pull up and service. Getting better efficiencies on superconducting transmission lines for longer distances. Massive amount of power in those sub-surface rivers.

Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

You only need to cover a half a percent of the Earth's surface with off-the-shelf 15% efficient PV panels to provide all of humanity all of its energy needs. If we covered all residential rooftops in the States with PV panels, we'd generate about as much electricity as the industrialized world needs -- and that's just residential rooftops just in the US.

To suggest that solar somehow isn't enough is just laughable. Hell, with the kind of abundance that solar offers, we've got far more than enough available to distill CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into hydrocarbons -- an incredibly energy-intensive process -- and use those hydrocarbons as our storage and transportation mechanisms just as we do today.

What we don't have is the willingness to invest our hydrocarbon inheritance in bootstrapping ourselves into such an energy-wealthy society. Instead, we'd rather squander our inheritance on monster SUVs and petroleum-based fertilizer to feed dozens of billions of people.

Here's some perspective from somebody who can actually do the math:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/

Cheers,

b&

Re:Not good at math

[greg_barton]

And how much concrete would be necessary to cover a half a percent of the Earth's surface? How much steel? Include the extra infrastructure for transmission lines.

Re:Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

You're suggesting we should build brand-new dedicated infrastructure out in the middle of nowhere. That's what our current mined energy sources do, and it's silly.

We already have all the structures we need, and then some. They're called, "roofs," and they're conveniently located anywhere and everywhere that a human is likely to be and want to use energy. As an added bonus, they're on top of these other structures called, "walls," which -- I shit you not! -- are already wired into the grid.

Of course the other "problem" with rooftop solar generation is that the owner of the building is the one who's earning the profits from producing power, as opposed to a centralized megacorp owned by the Koch Brothers or one of their compatriots, and we just simply can't have that, now can we? Homeowners becoming profitable and partially-self-sustaining small businesses? Why, that's positively un-American!

Cheers,

b&

Re:Not good at math

[cbarcus]

If you are a regular reader of Do The Math, then I am surprised that you are not aware of Tom Murphy's apprehension about renewables in addressing this crisis. It is not merely an issue of abundance, but also cost, convenience, and EROEI (net energy). That surplus energy is what makes our economy possible. If that surplus is eaten up by all the additional costs of trying to make a large-scale renewable system work (redundant infrastructure, storage, lengthy transmission), then our economy dwindles and we lose this game. The solution will not be found in low energy density sources of energy that inherently rely upon copious land and material use. And if we are to raise global energy-per-capita to merely 5 kW, what percentage of land do you think will need to be used? Far more than what you are suggesting.

This is the hard problem we are faced with. The general public has a great deal of superstition regarding nuclear energy and our industries have struggled to keep conventional technology cost effective and safe. There is no getting around the fact that not only do we require fission as the primary source of energy, but we must achieve a near term radical innovation in order to lower both liability and cost so that it becomes a commercially practical solution. Anything less than that (ie business as usual) and we have little hope of getting through this crisis without a major escalation of our problems.

Re:Not good at math

[burni2]

You should actually read all what's written in the text you are commenting on.

Also the 0.5% is an ideal figure in reality the 0.5% would be distributed as your predecessor did also mention.

and btw. which infrastructure well the same infrastructure already present and supplying your computer with electrons, the concept he hinted is decentralized
energy generation. And for the computer nerds the redundancy would be Raid1 on steroids.

Re:Not good at math

[burni2]

Install it by yourself go off grid and call yourself tea party anti-government!

Now better ?

Re:Not good at math

[Areyoukiddingme]

And how much concrete would be necessary to cover a half a percent of the Earth's surface? How much steel?

No more than you're already spending to build houses. The environmentalists got it completely backwards, as usual. Low density living is ideal for harvesting low density power. The roof of a typical suburban home can power itself with a major surplus right now. You live underneath your own power supply. That surplus is enough to add at least one battery electric vehicle and still come out ahead. And that's at current solar panel efficiencies. It will only get better as panel efficiency improves. Transmission line requirements are no different than they already are, at least as far as lines go. The equipment connected to those lines has to become a little more sophisticated, but only a little more.

Re:Not good at math

[greg_barton]

And what about "night" when, I shit you not, the sun doesn't shine...

Re:Not good at math

[greg_barton]

The grid infrastructure you're referring to often requires significant upgrading to handle two way electricity flow, and/or significant use of batteries.

Re:Not good at math

[greg_barton]

Low density living is not sustainable.

Re:Not good at math

[Areyoukiddingme]

What we don't have is the willingness to invest our hydrocarbon inheritance in bootstrapping ourselves into such an energy-wealthy society.

I dispute that. I know many many people, me included, who would go all solar if I had the capital available to do so. I don't have the capital available because all of the efficiency gains of the information age have been eaten by the wealthiest 1% of the population. I got none of it. My father got none of it. Environmentalism propaganda has worked. It's just that the targets of that propaganda don't have the financial ability to act on it. I haven't bought a new vehicle in 11 years, but I still don't have enough money to install all the solar panels I need. Meanwhile the people who own the companies I have worked for are multimillionaires. Even if they've installed solar panels on their mansion (and their vacation home) (and their rental properties), they still don't spend enough of that money to make a difference. If the masses had that money, it would be spent and we wouldn't even be having this discussion. My 70+ year old parents would have installed solar panels 20 years ago if they could have afforded it. That is how effective the propaganda has been.

We have the will. Just not the means.

Re:Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

First, we've already got more than enough baseload generation capacity for the indefinite future. We don't need to tear down what's already in place.

Second, I shit you not, we've already figured out how to store electricity. There're things called, "batteries," and you might even have one within arm's reach as you read these words; your next car might have one big enough to power your house for a day or so. Dams can be run in reverse during the day and drained again at night. Fuel cells work just as well backwards as forwards. Solar thermal plants are typically designed so they collect enough heat during the day to keep the turbines running through the night. Caverns can be pressurized. Or, if you're really feeling extravagant, you can, as I mentioned, use Fischer-Tropsch to generate hydrocarbons from CO2.

Is any of this as cheap as sticking a straw in the ground and sucking out crude oil? Well, actually, once you consider the cost of the externialities of oil production, it's a hell of a lot cheaper.

But, hey. You're apparently delighted to pay for the Koch Brothers's lives of luxury with your children's futures, so don't let any of this stop you.

Cheers,

b&

Re:Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

Electricity doesn't care which direction it flows. It's not like water that needs a push to get up a hill.

b&

Re:Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

A five-year payback time is equivalent to a 14% annual rate of return on your investment. Are you really so rich and / or foolish that you can afford to turn your nose up at a guaranteed 14% return on your investments?

b&

Re:Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

As Tom has most recently turned his attention to, the real problem is overpopulation, especially coupled with population growth. And I suspect he's about as pessimistic as I am at our chances of making it through this without an unprecedented crisis, if at all.

b&

Re:Not good at math

[argStyopa]

The you need to start a PV company, and start selling PV panels.

If it's as obvious and simple as you claim, then you'll be a billionaire in no time.

I'm not being flippant - if every internet wanker claiming that they know "the secret" to energy self-sufficiency were to just be right 1% of the time, we'd have no problems today.

Re:Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

Of course, I was writing in the inclusive "we" -- that is, "we" as a society.

I've covered my roof in solar panels; I'm generating about half again as much electricity as I'm using, enough to power the electric car I hope to buy in the next couple years. I'm fully aware that some of us are doing all we can to do right by ourselves and the planet.

But, sadly, collectively, we're doing precisely diddly and squat (to any appreciable rounding margin). In no small part, of course, because of the parasites you mention.

b&

Re:Not good at math

[Areyoukiddingme]

Yes it is.

Re:Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

Again, no need to turn existing undeveloped areas into glass-covered parking lots; we've already got all the space we need on our rooftops.

But, for reference, it's an area smaller than Texas.

And, again again, we're already 80% there with the smart grid, which already needs to deal with plants going offline and coming back online. And solar is quite predictable at the timescales that utilities need to deal with; and we've got plenty of baseload capacity to tide us over as we ramp up utility-scale storage.

Indeed, had we invested that trillion and a half dollars we just blew up in Iraq and Afghanistan in solar power infrastructure, we'd already be there....

Cheers,

b&

Re:Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

I've done the next best thing; I've covered my roof in solar panels, and I'm generating half again as much electricity as I use -- enough to power the electric vehicle I plan on getting in the next couple years. It's far and away the best financial investment I've ever made, with a guaranteed nearly-risk-free ROI in the 10% range.

I don't have any interest in getting into the construction and roofing business. But the contractor who installed my system, American Solar Electric, is quite profitable. If you're a qualified tradesman in Arizona and need a great job, I can put you in touch with them....

Cheers,

b&

Re:Not good at math

[greg_barton]

I guarantee you the. Koch brothers love renewables. They'll let them greenwash natgas forever.

Re:Not good at math

[greg_barton]

The grid cares.

Re:Not good at math

[greg_barton]

Pave the Earth!

Re:Not good at math

[cartman]

You only need to cover a half a percent of the Earth's surface with off-the-shelf 15% efficient PV panels to provide all of humanity all of its energy needs.

This is true, but the problem is, solar power is at the wrong place and time.

It would be entirely feasible to power Arizona using concentrating solar plants. Those plants could use thermal storage to provide power during the night. They could provide baseline power, all year long.

If we wanted to power the United Kingdom with renewables, however, it would be a very different matter. Concentrating solar thermal plants in the UK would have almost zero output for about 5 months out of the year. Photovoltaics would have very little output during the day in mid-winter there, and no output during the night. It is not possible to power the UK using wind turbines.

It would be very difficult to power densely-populated areas in northern latitudes using renewable power. That is why we need nuclear power for those areas.

Re:Not good at math

[cbarcus]

So, we can ruthlessly proactively eliminate "excess" population (ie Nazi Germany), just let things deteriorate and see what happens; or we can try to manage with education, contraception, and intelligently lowering the cost of energy. Obviously one of these options is far more civilized than the others.

The only reason for my optimism is that there are technological options for confronting our predicament, and once we get going on the right path, there will be great benefits for everyone. Heaven or Hell, the outcome is ours to choose.

Re:Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

Of course, I'm not advocating for genocide nor throwing up our hands. As I've repeatedly noted in this thread, I've gone solar, myself, and I've also already noted how the money we burned blowing up Iraq and Afghanistan would have been just about enough to switch the US entirely over to photovoltaics.

I'm just not at all optimistic that we're going to make a wise choice. I hope we will, but it's looking quite likely that we'll instead see economic and population crashes as a result of resource depletion and widespread pollution (such as the collapse of the oceanic fish stocks we're already witnessing). And, of course the wars that will inevitably accompany such chaos.

I really, really don't want to see that happen, but I can't honestly say that I see a realistic path forward that avoids that sort of thing.

b&

Re:Not good at math

[TrumpetPower!]

First, I haven't run the numbers for the UK, but I suspect your estimates are likely overly pessimistic. Remember that solar PV still works on cloudy days; just not as well. You Brits might have to install more panels per person than those of us in more temperate climes, and you might need to supplement further with other sources.

But...you may be on an island, but you're hardly cut off from civilization. Germany, whose entire country is worse for solar than the gloomiest parts of the Continental US, is going gangbusters with solar. And I'm sure, once they've finally got some surplus, they'd be delighted to sell it to you -- as would the French and Spaniards and Italians...and, with a sufficiently advanced grid, even the Saudis. And you have "neighbors" to the west who have more geothermal power than they know what to do with already.

Besides. Nobody ever guaranteed that the future would be better than the past. It might become prohibitively expensive to live in Britain, with or without solar. Then again, it might become prohibitively expensive to live anywhere else, either. Such is life...and death.

Cheers,

b&

Re:Not good at math

[Oceanplexian]

You only need to cover a half a percent of the Earth's surface with

The minute someone starts talking about energy sources in terms of "How many percent" of the Earth's surface they need to cover, I stop listening.
It's just number-crunching mental-masturbation to actually think that our energy problems can be distilled down in such a simple way.

If you live anywhere with actual seasons, and if you actually do crunch the numbers, you'll find that a rooftop solar array actually generates zip in the real world.
The 15% efficiency figure is pretty useless when the clouds are out and you've got 6 hour days with a low angle to the sun.

we'd rather squander our inheritance on monster SUVs and petroleum-based fertilizer to feed dozens of billions of people

As you've just demonstrated, electrical capacity is a small fraction of our global energy requirements

If you drive a RAV4-EV powered by a nuclear generating plant, the whole "SUVs are bad" argument becomes pretty meaningless. When the petroleum runs out, we need a power source that can run all our vehicles, transportation infrastructure, agriculture, and more. Solar/wind/hydro just isn't going to cut it.

Re:Not good at math

[HiThere]

Sorry, but the roofs of most single family dwelling units aren't strong enough to support enough solar cells to generate enough to equal the use within that dwelling unit. This doesn't even start to count the problems you get when you start considering apartment houses, where most people live.

Roof top solar panels are a great supplement, but not sufficient. This could be fixed with the "solar shingles" that one repeatedly hears of as "under development", but under development doesn't mean it will ever come out of development.

This doesn't mean that solar isn't the answer, or at least a major piece of the answer, but it does mean that simple-minded approaches won't work. (And adding in local storage at least doubles the cost of the installation. This is reasonable only for remote locations...or if you REALLY need a UPS.)

That said, I'm not really convinced by nuclear. Nobody has tackled the waste disposal problem, and the very companies that build them refuse to handle the insurance. Fusion is looking more and more like a pipedream. Every approach seems to generate huge amounts of radioactive waste. And the last I heard steel still couldn't hold it's strength after being submerged in a flow of neutrons for awhile.

There are many small, site-specific methods that are practical, some even dependable, but the problem is that they're site specific.

There is, however, one form of nuclear energy that if probably workable, dependable, and non-polluting (once you set it up, that is). You drill a hole deep through a layer of non-permeable rock, and explode a nuclear weapon. Then you set up a heat exchanger that runs down into the cavity produced by melting all the rock. Then you pump in some water (being careful that the steam doesn't escape) to improve the heat transmission. Seal it off, and pull out the power. I don't think anyone's ever tried this, but I remember hearing it proposed, and it sounded reasonable.

Re:Not good at math

[HiThere]

Low density living is much more sustainable. The problem is it requires a low population density.

Now low density living with commuting is probably NOT sustainable, but that's separate argument.

Re:Not good at math

[drinkypoo]

It's called PRT. Study it.

As well, there's no good reason why most people need to do quite so much driving.

Re:Not good at math

[greg_barton]

Physical Readiness Test?

Primary Response Team?

Poor Righteous Teachers?

Re:Not good at math

[AmiMoJo]

Concentrating solar thermal plants in the UK would have almost zero output for about 5 months out of the year.

Common misconception. Even when heavily overcast 80% of the sun's energy reaches the surface of the earth, you just don't have that point source of light that everyone loves. Solar PV might drop to 30 or even 20% efficiency, but solar thermal will basically track the energy reaching the surface. In other words even in the middle of winter it will be 80% efficient.

That's why people have solar thermal heating. It wouldn't be much use if it only worked in the summer.

Re:Not good at math

[Areyoukiddingme]

Likely he meant Personal Rapid Transit, which could potentially eliminate a great deal of pavement.

The precise method of transportation is irrelevant. Low density living is the only sustainable living possible because the only energy source that can keep us out of the caves for the duration of Earth's sojourn in the Sun's habitable zone is a low density energy source, namely sunlight. When the Sun expands into a red giant, how we power human civilization on Earth is no longer relevant. Until that time, it is relevant, and there is no energy source besides sunlight that can last that long. Not thorium, not uranium, not oil, not natural gas. Not even cow farts (another low density energy source).

I could have said that in my first response, but one naked assertion deserves another.

Re:Not good at math

[greg_barton]

Awesome that you can make technology projections in that time scale, especially when few can even project accurately even twenty years into the future. Bravo.

Re:Not good at math

[angel'o'sphere]

Well, if you belie the real problem is over population then you are as bad in math as the guy you smashed in your previous post.

Culling half of Indias population would reduce power consumption by x?
Culling half of Chinas population would reduce power consumption by y?
Culling half of USAs population would reduce power consumption by z?

Guess which country would be more effective to kill half of the population, in terms of energy saved afterwards and bullets needed?

Hint: it is not China and not India and no other "over populated" country.

Nuclear != Uranium

[Paddy_O'Furniture]

Nuclear is not just about uranium. Look at Thorium -- a plentiful and safe alternative that is more than just theoretical.

Re:Nuclear != Uranium

[gweihir]

Read the reports about the German experimental Thorium reactor and weep. The technology is very likely impossible to get right. Sure, it sounds nice in theory, but it does not pan out.

Re:"will not be sufficient" ?

[mark-t]

Sure... if we had ways to actually distribute that power to where it was needed at no cost.

When you transmit power over a distance, you end up losing part of it, and the further you are transmitting it, the more that you lose.

Invent a room temperature superconductor first... then we'll talk.

Make solar available to everyone

[Barsteward]

Instead of giving power companies subsidies, why not install solar on every home and business and then the grid becomes a fall back and not a single point of failure. Power generation should be distributed rather than concentrated.

Re:Make solar available to everyone

[yankeessuck]

This is not politically viable in the US. A large percentage of the population has no problem with the government giving free stuff to companies but then get all up in arms when it gives stuff to the people.

Re:Make solar available to everyone

[Bandraginus]

Too much locally-generated energy is bad for the grid.

For a grid-tied domestic solar installation, for example, to push power back onto the grid, it must generate a voltage higher than the existing grid to push the power backwards. So what happens is that all the local solar installations are competing against each other to power the grid.

We need to re-think and re-design how power is delivered if our ultimate goal is to have every house generate its own electricity and use the grid as fallback

.

Bye Bye Karma

[ScottCooperDotNet]

What happened to the story about the Obomacare web site I clicked on. Was I imaging it?

Oops, browser went nuts and refused to update properly. I should never post on a whim.

Stop getting your advice from Dan Quayle and Karl Rove.

Re:thorium OR ???

[Barsteward]

i think its like everything else, they want to make one huge machine to power an area rather than loads of smaller ones

My problem with nuclear

[rsilvergun]

is completely based on people. Everything starts out fine with the Gov't watching it and making sure it's safe, but safety costs a lot of $$$, and sooner or later somebody notices they could have that $$$ for themselves. The argument that every dollar gov't spends is just bureaucratic waste is pervasive and worse, it sounds plausible because it's easy to find pork projects and waste. Human's are pretty inefficient to begin with but when it's private waste you never know about it, because what company goes out of it's way to tell investors they spent $50 million on a software project that could've been done for $10 if it wasn't for hindsight :P. Gov't is public so that's all out in the open...

So the myth of bureaucratic waste passes the 'truthiness' test, and it gets applied to stuff like Nuclear safety inspections. They get privatized and before you know it a perfectly safe plant is now a disaster waiting to happen. The rich guy that pocketed the savings is 1000 miles away from ground zero so he doesn't care either. Worst case scenario he pays a $1 million dollar fine on $1 billion in profits...

I haven't been able to come up with a solution for this. Heck, most people don't even recognize it as a problem. They focus on the technical problems not the human ones. Until Nuclear can be done so safely that there's no money in ignoring safety it won't work...

Re:My problem with nuclear

[bill_mcgonigle]

There are a few problems going on together here. First, the safer nuclear reactors are prohibited by the government. Branson has been trying to bankroll integral fast reactors for several years and the Obama administration has continually stonewalled him. It was the Clinton administration that killed the commercialization of that technology in the first place. Not surprisingly, Gore took a personal interest in that (no conflict of interest there, right?) Third, the Feds nationalized nuclear insurance in the 60's. What private insurer would put their money behind a light water reactor with sketchy maintenance? Why would they charge the same premiums to a meltdown-able (I know, not a word) reactor as a meltdown-proof design like integral fast reactors or thorium reactors? Why would the power companies be able to afford the insurance on rusting barrels of nuclear waste next to the river that they just store there? That's both an insurance problem and one of the feds promising they'll take care of the waste (but never doing it). Because they can consume that waste, integral fast reactors would be a business opportunity all their own if the economics of the nuclear industry wasn't wildly distorted by the government(s). Even in England where they're building a new reactor (well, the Chinese and French are) the cost of power is double that of a coal plant. But, then again, the coal plants don't have to pay a dime towards the externalities they introduce by spewing both radioactivity (so much more than any nuclear incident ever did) and mercury and other heavy metals.

We don't have a technology problem here and we don't have an economics problem either. It's know-nothing wonder-mutts screwing with those that have us in this position.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[Mashiki]

There is no such thing as a "meltdown-proof" design. All reactors can suffer catastrophic failure that releases radioactive material into the surrounding environment. It would be more accurate to say the alternative designs you have mentioned are meltdown-resistant, in the same way bulletproof glass isn't truly bulletproof... you just need a bigger gun.

Thorium reactors by design are meltdown proof.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[girlintraining]

Thorium reactors by design are meltdown proof.

You know, I'd go with "citation needed", but how about I just bust this myth right here and now.

Thorium reactors require uranium and/or other fissile material. They are not any safer than conventional reactors on this basis. A shorter explanation of just how much of a pipe dream thorium reactors are is here along with the caveat that dropping a bomb on one would be a very messy affair.

And they are not meltdown proof; if the safety controls fail. Thorium reactors are so-called "meltdown-proof" because they have a plug in the bottom of the reactor that will disintegrate and drop the core into a large holding tank. As the molten salt that acts as the coolant is now spread out, the theory is this is safer. But it all depends on that plug giving way, and this is only a theoretical model.

Meltdowns are one possible failure mode of a reactor. They aren't even the most common, nor most dangerous, depending on the design. A thorium reactor can still fail catastrophically if the piping becomes plugged. Think about this for a second; the primary coolant is molten salt. What happens if it becomes too cool or solidifies in places; The plug as at the bottom, and heat rises. Impurities could slowly build up, the plug could fail to melt away due to corrosion, etc.

Thorium reactors are not meltdown proof; Poor maintenance is as much as hazard for them as any other. And as a bonus... they're about 50 years away from being feasible anyway.

Thank you for playing though... now kindly stop spreading bullshit.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[khallow]

But it all depends on that plug giving way, and this is only a theoretical model.

Or on the concrete around the plug melting. And how hard is it to design a plug that can still disintegrate even when heavily corroded?Wikipedia discusses the other safety features you never heard of.

A thorium reactor can still fail catastrophically if the piping becomes plugged. Think about this for a second; the primary coolant is molten salt. What happens if it becomes too cool or solidifies in places; The plug as at the bottom, and heat rises. Impurities could slowly build up, the plug could fail to melt away due to corrosion, etc.

Molten salt-based solar thermal power can fail in the very same way.

Thorium reactors are not meltdown proof; Poor maintenance is as much as hazard for them as any other. And as a bonus... they're about 50 years away from being feasible anyway.

Nonsense. There's no serious technological obstruction to them now. The real obstacle is coming up with a design that is economical to construct and operate.

Thank you for playing though... now kindly stop spreading bullshit.

Yet another Slashdot poster who can't be bothered to follow their own advice.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[khallow]

Nice ad hominim there.

There was no ad hominem there. Your ignorance is demonstrated by your post.

That's awesome! Wanna know what happens when the solar plant fails like this? They call it a nice day out. They won't call it that when your thorium pipe dream plant melts the outer casing and shits molten salt and core everywhere.

A core melt doesn't magically follow just because there is a leak or obstruction in the molten salt coolant system. They can just shut down the reactor like any other. It's not some 1960s design that requires active cooling.

The result is that the consequences are the same. The plant operator has to clean up some salts, thaw some pipes, and get the system running again.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[KonoWatakushi]

For an author of typically insightful comments, you would do us all well to educate yourself rather than citing nonsense and propagating FUD. Molten salt reactors are a silver bullet capable of end our dependance on fossil fuels. Working to tarnish the singular available option with that potential is not helpful.

Molten salt reactors are by definition meltdown proof, as the working state is already molten. The fuel salts are impervious to radiation damage, and the vessel will melt long before the salts boil, at which point the salts will drain onto the floor and ultimately still end up in the drain tank. The fuel is the coolant, and it has excellent thermal conductivity. At those temperatures heat dissipates rapidly, minimizing the difficulty of passive cooling. Even if the plant were turned into rubble, the heat would still dissipate into the surrounding environment and the salt would eventually freeze, all the while trapping the dissolved fuel and fission products. The freeze plug is a convenience to minimize damage to the reactor, but is not necessary for avoiding a large scale release of radiation--that is virtually impossible by any means. In the absurdly improbable event that some of the salt did boil away, that process itself would rapidly cool the bulk of the remaining salt, minimizing the release into the environment.

Unlike molten salts, the ceramic fuel elements of solid fueled reactors have very poor thermal conductivity and much higher melting temperatures. Worse yet, the rods contain more than a years worth of fuel, and trap all of the fission products over that period in a thermal insulator, with the volatiles inevitably released when cooling fails and the ceramic melts. That is a meltdown, and the escape of years worth of volatile fission products is indeed a very serious problem which simply doesn't happen with salts.

A thorium fueled molten salt reactor is continuously replenished, and contains no excess fuel. The magic of thorium is that it breeds in a thermal spectrum, and offers a simple chemical mechanism for reprocessing, not available in other fuel cycles. The thermal spectrum also requires much less fuel than the fast spectrum. Thanks to the fluid fuel, some volatile fission products like Xenon simply bubble out, and are continuously removed and sequestered. Others form stable salts with fluorine. All together, there is a minimum amount of fissile and decay heat present in any accident scenario, and the most dangerous long term hazards like cesium and strontium remain dissolved. The fluorine salts are among the most chemically stable compounds, and do not react violently with air or water. They are by far the safest place for nuclear fuel and fission products, where they can fissioned thoroughly, leaving virtually no waste.

With molten salt reactors, one has to be extremely creative to imagine disastrous accident scenarios. As a bonus, molten salt reactors were extensively researched, and about 10 years away in the 1970s. It might take a little longer today, but with a concerted effort, we could be mass producing reactors within 20 years, and well on our way to replacing all fossil fuel consumption later thus century. It is the one and only proven technology capable of that, so we ought to pick up where we left off without delay.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[ultranova]

All reactors can suffer catastrophic failure that releases radioactive material into the surrounding environment.

Unless, of course, radiactive material was never there to begin with. I wonder if you could do some interesting things by irradiating non-radioactive material with a fusor? Activate the material by irradiating it with neutrons and turn it into very short-lived isotopes which then decay into stable ones and release heat. Even if you blew the whole thing up with a bomb, there simply isn't anything to release. For the same reason you could export reactors to anyone who wants them with no fear of nuclear profiliation, and also remove the excuse of a peaceful nuclear program from anyone caught enriching uranium.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[TheRealHocusLocus]

You know, I'd go with "citation needed", but how about I just bust this myth right here and now.

Put up yer dukes, them's debatin' words!

Thorium reactors require uranium

A Two fluid LFTR requires a small amount of fissile to bootstrap a sustaining thorium reaction. It is mixed into the salt .

They are not any safer than conventional reactors on this basis.

Wrong. Your statement merely indicates that you have a zero-tolerance attitude towards the use of uranium, not that you have insight into LFTR. You are comparing a few pounds of fissile to seed a one-time LFTR startup with tons of uranium a light-water reactor consumes (actually 99.5% wasted) in a year.

A shorter explanation of just how much of a pipe dream thorium reactors are is here

A longer and more intellectually satisfying explanation of the LFTR concept is can be found here

along with the caveat that dropping a bomb on one would be a very messy affair.

...with effects and hazards confined to the radius of the blast itself, where the radioactive salts will go sub-critical and just sit there, not reacting with water or air until they can be gathered, contained and eventually recycled. Which would be soon. That is a best possible solution. But really, how does this scenario compare to anything else on the scales of energy production today?

How would you compare a bombed LFTR to the same bomb setting alight an entire oil depot, a pipeline, massive piles of coal, or a seam of coal underground? Or taking out the LNG tanks that could level the port of Houston? Or going straight to for the source, the 1991 fires of Kuwait? Attitudes are choices after all and if you're on Slashdot, chances are you've chosen civilization. Seems to me that LFTR would offer a terrorist a poor bang for the buck. It would be merely taken out of service, generate lots of overtime until it's cleaned up. No one over the ridge need evacuate.

To obtain gigawatts of carbon-neutral electricity that could go on for thousands of years, cheaply, how could you possibly beat that?

The plug as at the bottom, and heat rises. Impurities could slowly build up, the plug could fail to melt away due to corrosion, etc.

This passage mystifies me most of all. The 'frozen' plug is comprised of the same salts as the rest of the loop. It is being actively kept 'just' cool enough by a refrigeration unit. Extreme runaway heat from too much fissile would melt it quickly, as would shut-down of the refrigeration unit. There are no real 'moving parts' here to jam or be subject to corrosion.

Perhaps by 'impurities' you are imagining some sort of solid crust that might build up on the plug itself. I don't know the chemistry well enough to answer that. But existence of the plug does not preclude other ways of manually draining the loop. Anyway it just sounds like a case for good engineering and vigilance.

Poor maintenance is as much as hazard for them as any other.

As any other what? Now you are taking a zero-tolerance position for any technology that relies on any sort of maintenance at all. It is an absurd place to stand, and places you among those who honestly believe that when unexpected hazards present themselves, people will run like terrified rabbits into the forest to hide.

History does not support that idea. There are smart and brave people attending gigawatt reactors, and you cannot solve the world's energy problems with a Play-Doh Fun Factory.

And as a bonus... they're about 50 years away from being feasible anyway.

That's just a nope. You're jousting us with windmills.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[imikem]

How about structuring regulations and policy such that operators are rewarded for operating in a safe manner according to current best practice? Then pay the inspectors bonuses for finding issues. Nobody leaving the inspectorate allowed to work for the industry for say, five years following departure to minimize the revolving door/regulatory capture/graft issue. Actual, active congressional oversight would be nice.

There, now I'm out of whatever it was in my pipe. Time to order a yummy pepperoni pizza.

My strong preference is to replace coal and uranium nuclear with thorium LFTR. I haven't seen much that makes me think it not doable, and certainly the Chinese and Indians seem to think it promising. Do we really want to be stuck licensing their designs in 15 years because of a bunch of NIMBYs, fossil fuel profiteers and brainless green/Luddites? Yes, keep investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc. too. And in a global power transmission grid.

Seriously, we have solved harder problems. What we seem to lack is leadership who'll point the way and stay the course.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[Raenex]

For an author of typically insightful comments, you would do us all well to educate yourself rather than citing nonsense and propagating FUD.

Typically modded insightful. They are quite often off the mark.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent to oblivion. This isn't interesting, he's spouting bullshit. I'll show how.

Yes, Thorium needs a kick start to breed its own fissile fuel. Generally there is a small amount of uranium in the mix. But this is a very small amount, existing solely to allow Thorium to begin breeding its own Uranium 233. "They are not any safer than conventional reactors" is a massively incorrect statement, and I encourage you to do a similar study about what would happen if a bomb were dropped on a conventional reactor and see how comparatively messy the results get.

Yes, they are meltdown proof. You apparently are 100% ignorant or willfully spreading FUD. The controls are far more sophisticated than a plug in the bottom, but even if that WAS the control, IT WOULD WORK. Because it's a breeder reactor, and you just spread the materials out such that the neutron emitting cross sections no longer have high enough probabilities to spawn sufficient products to continue the reaction. You spread FUD just as bad as intelligent design bullshit with sentences like "the theory is this is safer." We know how this works. We've done the experiments verifying we know what we're talking about regarding nuclear criticality. It is safer. Period.

Every last one of your FUD arguments in the "Meltdowns are one possible failure mode" paragraph is baseless. Every one of these is taken into consideration in the design of these systems. These aren't even hard to debunk. Impurities building up? Heat rising? I'm not even going to touch these, they aren't worth taking the time to debunk.

Test reactors have been constructed and run successfully. They're as close or closer than any other nuclear tech. As for poor maintenance, the entire POINT is that any possible failure will not result in a catastrophic discharge of nuclear material. And even if it did, the half lives of the radioactive materials in a LFTR is orders of magnitude shorter than those from traditional reactors.

There is exactly one reason we haven't pursued Thorium reactors, and it's simple. This nuclear fuel chain has exactly zero chance of producing any weapons-grade fissile material. The USA harvested Uranium and, especially, Plutonium from reactors for many many years for bombs, as did every other nuclear capable country. Thorium salt reactors simply don't produce dangerous materials like this. Now, if EVERYTHING ELSE I just stated was wrong (it isn't), this alone would be plenty of justification to develop and deploy these reactors. Had Clinton given North Korea LFTR tech instead of the traditional reactor tech he did, North Korea would never have developed a single nuclear device.

In the future, please get your facts from actual scientists and experiments rather than random blogs.

Thanks for playing. Good work having some gullible mod points tossed your way, but sadly reality is inconsistent with every point you tried to make.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[MrKaos]

We don't have a technology problem here and we don't have an economics problem either.

Actually, with IFR, we have a materials technology problem.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[MrKaos]

First, the safer nuclear reactors are prohibited by the government.

Not an accurate statement. All nuclear reactors are restricted by the government, to the point that building a new one is effectively impossible. And while the government is enforcing these laws, it is because of idiot environmentalists that the situation persists. ...NIMBY and the ... NIMBY but because new plants are subject to environmental restrictions so onerous that they are effectively impossible to build and not operate at a loss.

It has nothing to do with governments or environmentalists. Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison) design recommendations specifically targeted at reducing the opportunities to sabotage a nuclear reactor installation and thus increase safety were too expensive to implement. Some 30 improvements were suggested however the AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design. AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek and Callaway, you will note in the picture the uncanny resemblence to the AP-1000 design (and similar capacity).

None of the designs incorporate features to ease the teardown and eventual decommissioning of the facility. For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2. You have to wait decades to allow the *really* radioactive elements to decay. This is because new and highly radioactive elements are created in the reactor core. It's still not something that has been addressed in an industrially proficient way that makes the sites safe or 'greenfeild'. Considering the 104 reactor sites around America are multi-core the United States will be looking at a conservative estimate of a quarter of a *Trillion* dollars, at todays prices, on reactor decommissioning alone.

That's the real reason these plants aren't being built - they're simply too expensive in the long term.

NIMBY. Stuff the environmentalists into rusty barrels by the river instead and the problem abates.

Responsible Nuclear Advocacy entails understanding why the concerns exist. It's not pro or anti nuclear, it's uncovering the mess of political, legal, financial and legacy nuclear industry propaganda to get to understand what the issues really are. The Nuclear industry is a mess, and our generation has a responsibility to future generations to resolve the issue while we still understand it and have enough resources to deal with it. You blame the NIMBY, the Not In My Back Yard, yet this is an obsolete concept as legal frameworks in the 2005 U.S Energy bill *preclude* the concerns of local ratepayers being considered when considering the placement of Nuclear facilities.

It might surprise you to learn that the Energy act of 2005 also abolished a guardian of the American Economy called the PUCHA, that was put in place to prevent a repeat of the 1929 stock market crash. Yes folks, line up, line up come and get yer pre approved reactor designs for tax discounts you can get even if you do nothing, get ready to sell sell sell your utilities and ratepayers get ready to part with more and more cash.

Think about that next time you criticise environmentalists for a reactor not being implemented and direct it to the oil companies who actually deserve it.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[bill_mcgonigle]

Actually, with IFR, we have a materials technology problem.

How so? The prototype reactor ran for a couple years without incident.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[girlintraining]

[wall of text]

I would point out that for someone claiming another is ignorant, I cited several articles for people to go an educate themselves on the matter. All you did was vomit up a multi-paragraph fuck you and tried to make it look academic, hoping nobody would realize you're really just a pompous asshole.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[angel'o'sphere]

A shut down reactor will produce for minimum 90 days enough heat to be still be able to melt down.
Hint: that is what happened in Fukushima: cooling failed, and 3 shut down reactors melted.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[KonoWatakushi]

I'm sorry you took it that way, I was rather hoping that you would read it and develop an appreciation of how fluid fueled reactors are utterly different and fundamentally superior. Then, hopefully discontinue suggesting that people "educate" themselves with the typical anti-nuclear/thorium propaganda. While your links do not have tailored rebuttals yet, I expect that all of the various specious arguments are addressed within, repeatedly.

For an actual education, I would suggest starting at Energy from Thorium, or the forum if you have technical questions.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[MrKaos]

A prototype is one thing however the issue is existing reactor designs last an inadequate 4-5 decades.

I actually support the development of a reactor that addresses the issue of 70,000 tons of Pu-239 currently stored in reactor sites around America, simply because it's irresponsible for our generation to foist this issue onto later generations.

Unfortunately, because there is no geologically sound Nuclear waste dump in operation it's totally inappropriate to discuss building a new reactor facility until a proper containment facility is available. Yucca mountain is not a suitable site because it is made of pumice and geologically active evidenced by recent aftershocks of 5.6 within ten miles of a repository that is supposed to be geologically stable for at least 500000 years. The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is inappropriate to contain nuclear waste, and long term corrosion data on C22 (the material to contain the Pu-239 and mitigate the ingress of water - yet another Yucca problem) is just not available.

We need something made of granite. The only human made structure with the potential to last 10000 years is Mt Rushmore, so it has to be an engineering project of that scale, because the logistical problems of transferring the 70000 odd tons of Pu239 to the "waste repository" (in reality - containment facility) are so involved that you want to get it right the first time and only do it once.

Even doing that will probably take 30 years to complete, but there is more to it than that.

I was a big fan of the Integral Fast Reactor, and in a way I still am. But the reality is 3rd and 4th generation reactors are a pipe dream because our material science is not advanced enough yet to produce a reactor design that will last thousands of years. If you are going to build reactors then do it properly and build a Terra-watt scale nuclear reactor facility the belly of a massive granite mountain with an attached waste facility that chomps up all your remaining plutonium or end all commercial nuclear activity altogether.

Nuclear power is energy intensive *after* the energy has been produced simply because our technology - especially material sciences - are not adequate to produce a Nuclear reactor (preferably a IFR style but safer) that has a life span that matches the geological time frames of the fuel. This exposes to all the issues associated with de-commissioning reactor sites every 4 decades or so. We need a reactor design that lasts at least 1000 years and is a closed loop, i.e. the plutonium goes in and nothing comes out (except electricity and possibly hydrogen). In short the smart thing is for us to do is stop producing toy nuclear reactors, while we still can, and build a dedicated place to store the plutonium (ie a granite mountain) that is also a suitable place to build a Terra-watt scale reactor that satisfies those characteristics, well designed and secured facility resistant to attacks even from orbit.

I don't hide the fact that I don't like the constant failure of the Nuclear Industry. But I'm also being realistic. I realise that the only way out of this mess is a well thought out and designed project because we have no other choice due to the nature of the materials. You have to redesign the entire industry, and it's a long term solution, but a much better legacy for future generations than a long term problem that will last a minimum of 25,000 years.

In the meantime we need to invest heavily in undeveloped, low externality, energy solutions like solar, wind, geo-thermal and micro-generation so there is enough energy *available* to carry out such an infrastructure project properly.

This is why I support reactor research but not commercial nuclear power, because so far the entire nuclear industry has been an unmitigated failure marred by industrial accidents and incompetence. I'm offering a solution path and any honest and realistic examination of the *facts* cannot draw any other conclusion of the Nuclear Industries characteristics to date.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[khallow]

A shut down reactor will produce for minimum 90 days enough heat to be still be able to melt down.

Again you display your ignorance. Most reactors in the world employ passive cooling after shutdown so that the reactor doesn't get that hot.

Hint: that is what happened in Fukushima: cooling failed, and 3 shut down reactors melted.

Fukushima was of an older design that didn't have the capability to passive cool. When it lost power to its active cooling (after the battery backup ran out of juice), then it started to overheat.

Re:My problem with nuclear

[angel'o'sphere]

Again you display your ignorance. Most reactors in the world employ passive cooling after shutdown so that the reactor doesn't get that hot.

Erm, what do you mean with ignorance? The word most? Yes I was unaware that "most" reactors can cool themselves long enough passively.

Fukushima was of an older design that didn't have the capability to passive cool.
Fukushima was of a design which most reactors in the world right now have ...

energy should be as cheap as the market dictates

[globaljustin]

energy should be as 'cheap' as the market dictates...which, in a properly competitive market, means really large companies with big time resources would then fund the *best* Research and Development to compete with each other to bring the cheapest & most sustainable (read: clean) energy that modern science can provide

your idea attempts to solve the right problems, but does it in the most contentions, unworkable way possible...this is why you fail

see, you identify some problems most would agree with:

We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy. We are overconsuming way too many goods..

everyone agrees with this...hell even some Republican Wal-Mart executive would agree with this even though they profit from it...

your solution of purposefully, artificially inflating prices is nothing more than a **giveaway to energy companies for doing nothing**

your idea guarantees a revenue chain for said energy companies, takes away incentives to do R&D on better technology (instead its marketing R&D), and ensures that the current, **unsustainable** fossil fuel model will continue

you are way, way off from solving the problems you identify

Re:Assumptions

[russotto]

Of couse there will "enough" renewables if demand is scaled down by conservation and the price of fossil fuels is raised high enough.

Didn't take long for "shiver in the dark" environmentalism to raise its ugly head.

Need it if we want to get rid of the nuclear waste

[quax]

What most people don't realize is that nuclear waste can be treated to render it harmless more quickly. And it can be done with a sub-critical reactor design.

I don't understand how you can call yourself an environmentalist and not be in favor of this technology.

Re:thorium OR ???

[pla]

i think its like everything else, they want to make one huge machine to power an area rather than loads of smaller ones

This, this this, a thousand times this.

Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.

It absolutely amazes me that building codes haven't evolved to require incorporating one of those two technologies into every new building. The baseline residential load could become a net generator within a decade.

But, it then becomes hard for the utilities to justify charging people for power the people themselves produce. I don't want to suggest we have any sort of vast conspiracy here - More like hundreds of individual companies all actively dragging their feet and refusing to upgrade their infrastructure to make distributed generation practical.


"Funny" story - Five years ago, I started playing with a small plug-and-play solar installation at my house. During the day, with no one home, my old analog electric meter would actually spin backward and credit me for excess production. Two years ago, my local power company rolled out a forced upgrade to digital smartmeters (and when I say "forced", I mean we had actual protests and lengthy court cases trying to block the change). And whatd'ya know, the new meter doesn't go backward. I effectively give my extra power production to the grid for free.

Of course, I have the option of contracting with the utility for a second meter basically installed backward - For which they charge me to sell them electricity. Last time I checked the numbers, I'd realistically need to produce over a megawatt hour per month just to break even on their BS fees - And with my current toy 400W installation, that won't happen.

Re:energy should be as cheap as the market dictate

[smpoole7]

> in a properly competitive market

The problem is ensuring that it's truly competitive. What has been happening is that corporations are merging to *eliminate* competition and ensure a continued revenue stream, even though the technology might be old and "unclean" (as far as emissions).

Corporations are also allowed to buy up patents which might clean up energy, but which are then tabled and never put into production. The only reason the corporation bought that patent is to (once again) *prevent* competition and to maintain the status quo.

Both problems are quite solvable: on the one hand, here in the United States, start rigorously enforcing the anti-trust laws. For patents, if someone doesn't make a good faith effort to produce that technology within, say, a few years, the patent becomes invalid and the innovation falls into the public domain.

Do note, by the way, that I'm writing as a conservative/libertarian in philosophy. But I'm not a fool, either. From my point of view, this is precisely one of those things that government could and SHOULD be doing, but isn't. :)

bring on the nukes

[globaljustin]

I am of two minds on opposition to nuclear power.

On one hand, I don't want to think about places like Pakistan, North Korea, Thailand, FSR's, etc having free reign to use nuclear power. It's like giving your redneck neighbor in Kentucky a vintage Ferrari. They litterally wouldn't be able to do anything but tear it up (try finding an oil filter for a 80s Italian sports car in rural Kentucky...)

On the other hand, its immoral to stifle technology and human development. We have harnessed the power of the atom and we need the energy it can provide or our species will **destroy itself**

In the final analysis, pushing down technology and progression of human knowledge is a delay tactic at best...that's why I favor a full frontal R&D assault on nuclear power...let's kill it...pin it down like a butterfly...

Fusion is in this conversation somehow, but it's not just about R&D for new types of nuke power...we can do both...

We should have "Mr. Fusion" processors on our cars...or at least powering our homes...the tech is there to do it safely if we only put the R&D into the engineering of it (which is not a simply task of course)

Re:oh thorium how i doth love thee on slashdot

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Funny you should mention Thorium.

Here are a couple of letters (postal+email) I have written to Senator Inhofe and Halliburton Corporate. They express my sense of urgency. I invite everyone to review them and comment. Flames are welcome too. Whopee! I have a 'foe' now! Movin' on up.

And if your own process of discovery also leads you to some conclusion that is best expressed by getting the word out -- please do so. Whether you are not a thorium advocate, please consider the underlying issue, the necessity for an urgent PUSH to develop energy independence.

To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

It's about keeping the lights on.
Thanks for reading this, that and the other thing.

Radio Activity Colorless? Oderless?

[LifesABeach]

I already can see and smell 4 talking heads, three days in the sun. Maybe these Einstein's can figure out how to tap into Lighting? It's not like it can be used up.

Re:Assumptions

[duckintheface]

As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.

And I guess if global warming runs it's course, we'll all be to hot to shiver. :)

Same Old Nonsense

[b4upoo]

So here we have four scientists who somehow discount the fact that we have no need for a larger population either locally or world wide. Further they assume that we need a lot more industry and further assume that the new industry will consume a lot of energy.
                      It makes me wonder just how scientific they are being and if not why.
                      We can pass and enforce strict birth control laws. We can also halt all immigration which will do something to limit the size of population in the US and probably in other nations as well. We can also enforce programs to make industry, business and homes more energy efficient.
                        It must be obvious at this point that resistance to change is suicide. With unchecked population and unchecked growth no amount of nuclear power plants or anything else will help us one bit. I am saying it flat out. COMPLY or die.

Re:Same Old Nonsense

[BlueTemplar]

You know, I wonder if the human race wouldn't be better off with this scenario rather than the direction we're currently going on...

Re:Same Old Nonsense

[Areyoukiddingme]

Dr. Malthus never goes out of style.

It's time you woke up and noticed the world has changed. Everywhere in the first world, birth rates have fallen. In every single industrialized nation, the birth rate has dropped below the replacement rate. As in, populations will FALL, not increase. Japan is leading the charge, but it's true everywhere. The sole reason why the US population has continued to grow is immigration. If not for immigration, both legal and illegal, US population would have started to fall already.

A high energy highly industrial population solves its population problem automatically, without any birth control laws at all. This is fact, not projection or prediction. It has already happened. If you want to stabilize global population, push first world living conditions to everyone on the globe as fast as you can.

Re:Same Old Nonsense

[NicBenjamin]

In the US we don't have the birthrate to sustain our current population, so I really don't see why we should do anything to reduce that birthrate. If we want Social Security to survive we should actually probably be strongly encouraging a higher birth-rate. Most of the rest of the hemisphere is rapidly approaching that point. So immigration restrictions on Mexicans, Brazilians, Canadians, etc. aren't going to reduce the overall footprint of humanity on this half of the globe. Much of Asia and Europe is also losing population. Africa and India aren't, but both the continent and the subcontinent have declining birthrates. There is literally no reason to believe that the human population won't peak in the 2050s.

In other words don't worry. It won't be long before growth of all kinds stops.

Re:Same Old Nonsense

[BlueTemplar]

It's time you woke up and noticed the data doesn't actually support your hypothesis :
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-population-problem/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-already-written-future/

Re:Same Old Nonsense

[Areyoukiddingme]

It's not a hypothesis and those data support the claim perfectly. Note the graph of population growth rate as a function of fractional energy exporters. The entire OECD collectively manages barely 0.5% growth including immigration. None of those charts show the effect of removing immigration. Other people have shown that effect. It results in a negative growth rate across the OECD.

I repeat, the birth rate has dropped below the replacement rate in industrialized nations. The only thing sustaining the growth rate is the birth rate of other countries. Typically countries that are less industrialized. As these other nations raise their standard of living, their birth rates will drop as well, and for the same reasons. The correlation between energy export and growth rates is interesting but not explanatory. In any case, we're told Peak Oil has already happened, which means those countries that are currently exporting energy will be exporting less and less over the next several decades. If the correlation remains true, the birth rate in Qatar will plummet. Problem solved.

Re:Assumptions

[Bongo]

The devil is in the numbers. By how much would we have to scale down?

bullcrap

[Mr_Nitro]

thermodynamic generation is more than enough, see Solar One in Nevada or all the Andasol powerplants in Spain. Low tech installations, no hazardous materials, no power reduction over time, store energy for night useage too. Why don't cover half a desert with them? cos we're dumb.

Re:Assumptions

[russotto]

No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.

Only if you ignore the costs. If I'm using energy it's because I get something useful out of it. If I "conserve" by not using that energy, I forego the benefits of that energy. Sure, I could just leave the heat off all year round, I'd save a fortune that way, even accounting for the cost of thermal underwear. But I don't want to live that way.

well this is nice

[globaljustin]

Do note, by the way, that I'm writing as a conservative/libertarian in philosophy

we more or less agree on this issue it seems and I'm a self-described 'left-leaning libertarian' & rabid critic of the GOP/"tea party"/conservative/"libertarians"

America knows fair competition. We celebrate it every Sunday w/ things like NFL football. We love absolute raw carnage within certain agreed boundaries that limit the factors of competition towards meritocracy.

We can ensure every market is 'properly' competitive...or at least very close on a continual basis.

You'd probably disagree w/ my comparison of health insurance company's profit model to the RIAA's profit model, but maybe I'm wrong.

Re: well this is nice

[C10H14N2]

You use the NFL -- a viciously protective, extortionate tax-exempt monopoly -- as the standard for celebrating raw, unbridled competition? In a way, I totally agree. That IS the American ideal end-game of "free-market" "competition."

Doing more with less does not solve the problem

[cbarcus]

To the contrary, energy prices need to come down drastically to help us mitigate the risk of all of the issues we are facing in relation to sustainability. Lowering energy costs is critical for addressing poverty, and it will be vital for combatting global warming. So it isn't that we want fossil fuel costs to go up so that renewables are more competitive which will exasperate the economy, rather, we wish for nuclear power production to become far safer, flexible, efficient, and cost effective to drive fossil fuels out of the market. Completely eliminating fossil use while lowering energy costs must be the goal!

Re:Doing more with less does not solve the problem

[angel'o'sphere]

Energy prices have no effect on poverty.

People are poor, by definition, because they have no money. Lower the energy prices and they still have no money. Perhaps organize your economy so that the "poor" have a chance to get a job, so they have money?

Or introduce social care so that poor get money from the society (like the rest of the first world is doing it).

I mean, I earn like $2500 a month and pay $135 on energy ... even if I would only earn $1000 or $800 the $135 would be bearable. If i would be below $800, I would get "social care" from my state for health care and housing and energy ...

It Isn't An All-Or-None Proposition

[Paddy_O'Furniture]

The authors are not saying "drop pursuit of renewables in favor of nuclear"; the point they make is that (FTA) "Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" . Certainly work on renewables should continue. The authors assume that climate change is real and a solution to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is required now in order to stem it. Again, from the article: "[Environmentalists are] cheating themselves if they keep believing this fiction that all we need is renewable energy such as wind and solar....The time has come for those who take the threat of global warming seriously to embrace the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems" as part of efforts to build a new global energy supply."

4 prominent scientists forgot to do the math

[rewindustry]

this is no different from the theory that dropping nukes on gooks solves things.

first we should count the gooks, not forgetting us geeks on our bikes.

then we begin to calculate our energy needs.

finally we discuss who gets to drop what on whom, and why not.

...you must be crazy, if you think you're strong
cause it happens to be an emergency...

Too long to scale up renewables?

[mspohr]

Their primary argument seems to be that it will take too long to scale up renewable energy sources.
This seems a very odd and disingenuous argument when you consider that it takes at least 10 years to build a nuclear power plant but large solar and wind farms can be built in 1-2 years. Small scale solar and wind can be installed within a few months.
Their argument just doesn't make any sense.

Re:Assumptions

[DamonHD]

The world is not binary: there's a vast range of possibilities between leaving heating on the entire year and opening the windows when you get too hot to never turning it on.

Raising the price of energy would help push people away from the stupidity of the first of those (yes, some do), to be just as comfortable and healthy on much less. I've easily managed to halve my energy use while adding two children to my household: it is depressing that some will not even try at the risk of damning their successors...

Rgds

Damon

Geographically concentrate nuclear for safety

[Eravnrekaree]

I think what we should do with nuclear is to establish 5 or so nuclear districts in the country about 20 by 20 square miles each and then locate all of the new nuclear plants inside those locations, and feed the output into the grid. This concentrates the risk of contamination in one area, its better to have all of the risk concentrated in a single area, rather than around a larger number of nuclear sites. This also makes things better for the nuclear regulators, these districts could house all of the nuclear regulators who would constantly monitor the sites for safety. Massive numbers of microreactors could also be stacked at these 5 nuclear districts. The nuclear sites should be located away from any urban areas, or prime agricultural lands.

I think in addition, thermal and concentrated solar technologies should be widely deployed. The big advantage of concentrated solar is you can focus light from a large area onto a very small but efficient piece of photovoltaic, the surface area of photovoltaics needed is reduced and thus the cost and the strain on materials.

Concentrated thermal reduces the need for expensive seminconductor manaufacturing since it involves a heat collector made of simple materials and can convert thermal heat into electricity with microturbines or sterling engines, or be used directly for hot water and mechanical energy.It also can be made of more abundant materials rather than the expensive rare earth metals of PV. Concentration is done with fresnel lenses or solar mirror dishes.

We do need to get away from this high that solar == photovoltaic. It is probably the case that thermal concentrated solar is cheaper, easier to manufacture, more practical, simpler, easier to maintain and repair, than expensive, complex, hard to fabricate PV. The obsession with PV and the ignoring of the concentrated thermal has for decades stymied progress that could have been made with larger deployment of thermal solar. A less expensive technology, even when less efficient, can produce more energy than a more expensive but more efficient technology, since you can buy more with the same money of the less expensive technology. With all of the space available on roofs, we should use that otherwise wasted space for solar collection. We should encourage power companies to install the solar panels on the roofs of customers, sharing with customers a percentage of the profit. Deserts are also ideal places for solar plants and most solar plants should be placed there due to high sun availability and the relatively low environmental impact.

Re:Geographically concentrate nuclear for safety

[BlueTemplar]

Concentrating nuclear power plants probably won't work because like all thermal machines they need to dump their waste heat somewhere.

Re:Geographically concentrate nuclear for safety

[Eravnrekaree]

There really is no "waste heat". The fact we would treat heat as waste shows a problem in our thinking because heat is a form of energy and isnt that what we are after. So use the waste heat itself to generate electricity. Have a closed water circulation system that converts the thermal energy into mechanical energy. The fact that the plant needs to have a resevoir of water to pull from does not interfere with colocating plants in the same general vicinity.

Re:Geographically concentrate nuclear for safety

[russotto]

So use the waste heat itself to generate electricity.

A gentleman by the name of Carnot would like to have a word with you outside.

Re:Geographically concentrate nuclear for safety

[BlueTemplar]

That's already what those plants do (they're thermal machines). All power plants increase the temperature of their environment, nuclear power plants even more so since they tend to be quite powerful. And there's a limit of how much heat they can dump without severely impacting the environment, not to mention that their efficiency depends on the cold source staying as cold as possible which would probably become a problem if you were to concentrate them.

We need a new nuclear vision to save our economy

[cbarcus]

We cannot solve the climate crisis without also addressing the economic crisis. Lowering energy costs and revitalizing the economy demands that we utilize our most practical energy dense sources. Nuclear fission has incredible potential, but unfortunately innovation in this sector has stalled for decades and today we are left without adequate technology for addressing our problems. Back in the 60s, the United States Manhattan-era nuclear physicists pioneered a radically new approach to power production: the molten salt reactor. That research culminated in a very successful prototype of a high temperature liquid fuel machine that ran for over 10 thousand hours. Today we need to pick up where they left off so that we can finish the work and transform how we produce energy. It'll take years and $billions to address the additional technical challenges that await us, but the alternative is the remain mired in confusion as our low density energy sources fail to make fossil fuels obsolete. If our goal is not to completely wipe out fossil fuel use with a vastly more cost effective and convenient energy system, we are headed in the wrong direction!

photovoltaics not (yet) the answer

[rewindustry]

we might be getting there, but solar panels are not, in themselves, a renewable resource. as far as i know, they consume a lot of rare materials to make, and an irreplaceable portion of this is consumed in use. i stand to be corrected on this, but i gather it is also true for battery technology.

on a slightly larger scale - solar collection with mirrors, especially "tower and heliostat" method, with liquid salt storage, seem to work well.

see abengoa in spain, and later developments, oddly not well documented in merkinland.

Re:photovoltaics not (yet) the answer

[DamonHD]

I don't think there's anything exotic of necessity in plain old monocrystalline PV. Basically sand with some common dopants. Other parts of the system as usually constructed, possibly, but I can't think of anything crucial.

Rgds

Damon

PS. And the EROEI for PV is better than tar sands, even if deployed in the UK, I believe.

Renewables are the only thing that can save us now

[BlueTemplar]

Sigh, another bad reporting from Slashdot and Yahoo News. Those scientists are specifically talking about "_safer_ nuclear energy systems" and "_modern_ nuclear technology". That disqualifies 99% of operating nuclear reactors out there.

Now those scientists are to blame too, since they could have had thought of the media warping their message into one that seems to support the current nuclear industry, and put more emphasis on that aspect.

What I find curious is that they are making jumps in their conclusions. For instance they say that "Global demand for energy is growing rapidly and must continue to grow to provide the needs of developing economies." Energy is not only electricity. About 1/3 of energy is used in transportation and most of that energy comes from oil-derived products. If that transportation were to be severely reduced our economies would grind to a halt. And that is exactly what is going to happen during this decade as the oil supply cannot keep with it's demand and the Energy Return on Energy Invested keeps going lower and lower.
One reason why nuclear energy (past and future) is suffering is because of very high investment costs. If it's hard to economically justify building nuclear reactors now, it's going to be impossible during a collapse. And those new nuclear reactor designs are not instantly going to appear out of thin air : you need several decades of research and testing before they become commercially viable. So the time to start research and testing on those reactors was in 1990s. Now it's way too late.
So we're stuck with renewables. We'd better build as many as we can now, before they too, become unaffordable and we're back in the Middle Ages again but now with a depleted planet and a 7 billion strong population we cannot feed without tractors and fertilizers.
More on this here:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-10-30/snake-oil-chapter-6-energy-reality

I wonder if these scientists are not aware of this situation or are they just kidding themselves?

All countries should be exporters

[tepples]

if all were exporters who would consume?

The other markets would buy things and export other things back to us. That's what trade is supposed to be about. Under the Balassa-Samuelson model, the quickest way to increase a currency's value is to ramp up export production. If all were net exporters, on the other hand...

Re:All countries should be exporters

[ebno-10db]

Under the Balassa-Samuelson model, the quickest way to increase a currency's value is to ramp up export production.

That would be fine -if Germany were the only country using the Euro. That was the argument against the Euro from the beginning, and it looks like the doubters were right.

Re:thorium OR ???

[Mycroft_VIII]

Have you looked into the varied ways to store the excess generated during the day to use at night?

Mycroft

50 TW by 2050 should be our goal

[cbarcus]

Today global energy use is on the order of 17 terawatts. Global capita consumption is close to 2 kW while in the US the average is closer to 10 kW. To merely raise the global average to 5 kW requires that we produce on the order of 50 TW by 2050. This is inconceivable with any kind of renewable plan which at best aspires to deliver a fraction of today's consumption while dramatically raising costs and land use. In fact, 50 TW is also inconceivable with conventional (solid fuel) fission power plants as well.

Liability and waste management can be addressed with better designed systems, but we need to show some enthusiasm and support for the innovation we need in nuclear development. Time is running out for mitigating our collective risk in this very precarious situation that lies at the nexus of economic, climate, and sustainability challenges. Energy is what ties everything together.

Re:Assumptions

[DarkOx]

This is truth in both arguments. We would probably use much less energy and maintain the activities we currently enjoy. Higher energy prices might lead you to replace that 15 year old 85% efficient furnace with a modern 98% efficient one. Naturally there is opportunity cost in making that investment. You have to give up something else you could have put that capital toward.

I think the difference between me and the grandparent is I am opposed to artificial steps to raise the cost of any type of energy because I don't think its my place or governments to try and tell you how or manipulate how you allocate your wealth.

Energy is already expensive enough, nobody is "doing it badly on purpose any more" 70 years ago people hardly bothered to insulate buildings. Heating fuel was cheap and wages were rising. Nobody cared, how much heat bled through the walls; nobody builds houses that way any more in North America; everyone cares about energy efficiency. They question for society is do you actively hurt people who are still living in old houses by interfering in the energy economy to force certain behavior form them? I think that kind of environmentalism is immoral and despicable, people who support it whether they admit it or not are anit-freedom.

A cobbler should stick to his last

[cheesecake23]

IAAESS (I am an energy system scientist).

These are four of the most prominent *climate* scientists in the world. But not one of them has published a single paper on energy systems (as far as I can see in their online lists of publications). There is a whole field of science concerning integration of intermittent renewables, and these guys have never demonstrated any expertise in this area.

I'm sure all four of them get extremely annoyed when scientists in fields completely unrelated to climate change spout climate skeptic nonsense all over the media (I do too). Now they are guilty of the exact same sin.

Re:A cobbler should stick to his last

[BlackSupra]

As an energy system scientist, what is your opinion on the solution?

Re:A cobbler should stick to his last

[green is the enemy]

I'm also curious what an actual expert thinks. I think both nuclear and renewables need a good energy storage solution to reach their full potential. Currently pumped hydro is looking the most promising. Is it worth investing more into this technology, for example to make it take up less land for reservoirs? Are the people advocating nuclear and renewables also advocating storage technology?

Re:A cobbler should stick to his last

[Grampa John]

IAAESS also. There is clearly enough wind and solar energy available in the U.S. to meet our needs. It could be scaled up to completely replace coal-burning in much shorter time than it would take to build a new generation of nuclear plants, and with much less public subsidy. But that's not the real problem with nuclear. The bigger problem is that baseload resources are basically incompatible with renewable resources like wind and solar, because they cannot respond quickly enough to "fill in the gaps" when the wind stops blowing or the sun goes down. A large nuclear plant can take three days to start up, and a coal plant can take 8 hours or more. If you want really expensive electric power, build a new nuclear plant or a large coal plant in a place that already has high penetration of renewables, like Denmark or Germany or Spain, or even California. If you are lucky, you can run it about 10% of the time, so the cost has to be recovered with a fraction of the design output. For a nice description of what's happening to baseload plants in Europe, see a recent article in the Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21587782-europes-electricity-providers-face-existential-threat-how-lose-half-trillion-euros. There's a much cheaper way and less risky way to go if cutting CO2 is the goal: renewables plus storage and demand response. It's happening in California already.

Re:A cobbler should stick to his last

[LeadSongDog]

Interesting analysis, but the conclusion is wonky. The problem you highlight is caused by two things: grossly distorted pricing structures intended to subsidize "renewables" and perception-skewed design safety profiles (out of all proportion to real risk) that artificially jack up the cost and delay the approval, build & commissioning of nuclear while encouraging the burning of more dangerous fossils or the broiling of birds in sunbeams. For the most part, totalitarian states don't have these problem, they can do the sensible thing without worrying over NIMBY. Odd though, that China keeps building coal plants despite their access to nuclear.

Re:Assumptions

[geoskd]

What assumptions is Hansen making here? Of couse there will "enough" renewables if demand is scaled down by conservation and the price of fossil fuels is raised high enough. Global warming is an externalized envionmental cost of fossil fues. If those costs are internalized in the price of fossil energy, the free market will take care of the problem. Or we can just raise taxes on fossil energy and use the money to build renewables.

What Hansen is really saying is that there will not be enough renewables if we continue with business as usual, including subsidies to the fossil fuel and nuclear industires. That is true but it relies on the wrong assumtions.

The basic problem with conservation and demand being reduced by increased cost, is that countries will go to war over energy concerns. This means that if there is even the perception that a country will not have enough energy to meet its wants, then wars will break out as a result. Renewables cannot meet the need yet (if ever), and hydrocarbons are not acceptable for obvious reasons. That effectively leaves nuclear. If we rely on "conservation" to reduce demand, then we are setting ourselves up for failure, because there are far more people in the world who are set to increase their energy usage than there are who are set to decrease. The only way to stop these emerging economies from worsening the problem, is to give them non-hydrocarbon technology, or kill them. The latter is not really practical for a whole host of reasons, and the former is only practical with nuclear power.

Waiting for the "free market" to solve global warming is like waiting for the Chinese government to solve human rights abuses. It just aint gonna happen any more than Santa Claus is going to give us world peace for Christmas this year.

what a load of crap - nobody is buying it

[slashmydots]

Ooh look at all our math and science and graphs and studies and blah blah blah. If this was actually founded in reality and not biases, bribes, personal interest, and greed, they'd be saying fusion is where the money should go. If you build a fusion plant and create radiation-less energy with no side effects and a waste output of mundane atoms, you're already pretty good. Now turn everything off and walk away. Oh look, it does nothing, unlike a nuclear fission reactor, which will blow everything up and poison thousands of square miles for hundreds of years. In fact, a hurricane mixed with a tsunami mixed with a sharknado would simply blow out a fusion reactor like a birthday cake candle. So they can take that report/study/press release and shove it directly up their asses.

Re:what a load of crap - nobody is buying it

[danlip]

"founded in reality"? You are advocating a technology that no one has ever successfully built, despite a huge amount of effort.

Re:what a load of crap - nobody is buying it

[rubycodez]

you are very funny. Fission works. No fusion reactor even puts out one hundredth the energy by fusion of the electrical energy put into it. And more news for you, the heavy hydrogen and tritium fusing *do* release neutron radiation. Only the unobtainable fusion (needing even more energy input) invovling boron or lithium would produce no neutrons.

Re:what a load of crap - nobody is buying it

[slashmydots]

You're an idiot. They just made a reactor that puts out more than you put it, they fuse Boron, not Tritium, and it doesn't release any radiation that can't be blocked by tin foil.

Re:what a load of crap - nobody is buying it

[rubycodez]

No, you are ignorantly believing headline hype. That "breakeven" event actually was 1.8 MegaJoules of energy causing 1.4 kilojoles of energy to be released. in other words, 0.0077 the energy of input. look it up -> http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2013/10/fusion-breakthrough-nif-uh-not-really-%E2%80%A6

Moreover, also in that article, DT fusion produces alpha particle and neutrons. Only the alpha would be blocked by tinfoil you imagine would shield. the neutron field is quite dangerous. All working fusor types make neutrons, the aneutronic boron-hydrogen or lithium reactor is quite out of reach of current technology

Re:thorium OR ???

[WaywardGeek]

Nice story. PG&E in California used to only give you credit for the fuel they calculated they didn't burn due to your feeding power to the grid, even though that was maybe 1/3 of everyone's electric bill. Obviously, we need to change this sort of BS behavior at utilities. PG&E, IIRC, has paid a proper rate for customer's power generation for at least a couple decades now. However, there's nothing wrong with utility scale solar in many places. There are inefficiencies of scale that they can make use of while you can't. Right now, here in NC, there seem to be enough tax credits for farmers to plant solar panels instead of food, and we're getting 10 acre solar farms all over. A friend of mine is installing solar panels on the new building he's constructing. The world-wide implosion of government sponsored solar installations has enabled the free market to finally deliver solar modules in the $1/watt range, making solar cost effective in many many cases.

Still, wind and solar aren't the entire answer to our power needs. It rains a lot here in NC, and wind is highly variable. Nuclear is good for "base" load, which means they run all the time at near full power, solar is good for those hot summer days when we need air conditioning, and natural gas generators are good for making up the gaps.

I wish we were funding Thorium development. It's not going to magically appear and start producing cheap safe clean nuclear power. To get there will take a massive investment and many years, but there's real promise there. I prefer the "all of the above" approach to energy.

Ok how's this for a start

[presidenteloco]

Most reasonably complex ecosystems are more valuable than you, and don't make me choose.

Re:thorium OR ???

[pla]

Have you looked into the varied ways to store the excess generated during the day to use at night?

Unfortunately, "grid tie" makes a lot of the cost savings in a modern solar or wind installation possible. No battery banks, no charge controllers, no dedicated solar/battery powered circuits with their own inverters, no backup generator if you go totally off-grid - With grid tie, you just feed all your solar into a single modestly-priced grid tie inverter with anti-islanding protection (or a hardwired cutover switch), and call it good.

Once you start getting into offline storage, the cost - And more importantly, the hassle - Goes up drastically. At least until we get affordable supercaps that hold somewhere on the order of 50KWH. That might make all these issues a moot point. Until then, grid tie at the mercy of the utilities sadly counts as the best option.

windturbines btw. 3-6 months

[burni2]

also these wind turbines do actually in most countries supply the biggest part of the renewable energy mix.

Re:windturbines btw. 3-6 months

[TrumpetPower!]

Wind definitely has its place in the energy production mix of today and the future. However, as with hydroelectricity, it's just displaced solar and can't even come close to matching more direct solar energy harvesting (especially photovoltaic and solar thermal) on a global scale.

I wouldn't at all want to discourage somebody from harvesting wind power, and there're lots of situations where it'd be stupid to not do so. But, as incredibly wonderful as it is as a niche player, it's still a niche player. Wind by itself is never going to quench our thirst for energy.

b&

Re:windturbines btw. 3-6 months

[burni2]

But perhaps you will mention that I don't take thermal solar not into account
1.) concentrated ?
a.) direct to steam
- working models exist, yes
- working models have problems, yes - heat resistant materials
- efficiency is not so good because of secondary processes applied, also the size of the steam turbine is governed by the space up in the chamber tower

here the topics - b. c. d. e. f. g. - also apply see down below

b.) melting salt/natrium to steam
- efficiency loss due to secondary process
- but nighttime storage for energy
- working models exist (small scale plants)

2.) small scale ?
- efficiency loss per area due to small delta_T or apply secondary processes (heat pump but also a heat pump needs energy)
but great for warming your home pool or shower water
- proven technology

Conclusion on why thermal solar power is irrelevant in the picture:
At the moment (direct) thermal solar energy makes up only a 1/1000001 small fraction of electrical energy generation
thermal energy preservation & storage is however limited by storage capacitiy and the local holding points.

This is because the plants are either small scale working models or plant size working models, but they do come with high investment cost,
huge usage of space and "engineering problems" and problems equal to cost for operation and troubleshooting

you need to take the following things into account:

a.) storage of energy
- yes you can store pv energy as H2 / but any given process comes with a loss
- yes you can store wind energy as H2 / but any given process comes with a loss
- energy storage is very expensive

but you should not apply an efficiency factor before the energy is put out into the grid lines.
calculate cost for building a storage device

b.) position
- you have countries that are more nother and get less direct sunlight
- you have countries that are more south and get much direct sunlight

if you want to fill the distance gap goto d.) and evaluate further

c.) daytime & season & weather
- bad weather = bad pv, perfect wind
- good weather = med pv, good wind
- sunny perfect weather = perfect pv, bad wind

- night = 0.4% pv (on a full moon), good - perfect wind
- day = good pv, bad - good - perfect wind

season - depends on position

d.) distance
- distance is loss the more distance you need to cross the more you loose
- if you have distant source and drain your efficiency will decrease

e.) space usage
- pv is a space consumer because within a pv field you cannot use much space you will loose much light because it's shadowed away
- around wind farms in contrast cows can eat the grass that was fueled by sunlight, the space can be used more diverse

and so:
more space equals to less economic efficiency
less space equals to more economic efficiency

f.) cost
pv is Factor (4 - 8) times more expensive then wind

g.) return of invest / return of energy / resource usage / resource recylcing ..

"Just displaced solar energy"

That statement is wrong if used as an argument to support your theory that wind is a niche.
Because you leave out the view, that "wind energy" is "conserved" and "transportable" solar energy. If you look at direct solar energy alone
you absolutely dissmiss the fact that the earth and it's atmosphere is a storage and distribution network for energy.

The invariant in your view is the pure "scientific" view, yes theoreticly you could replace wind by solar, and vice versa, but on the other hand you would have to find solutions for the topics I mentioned, and finding solutions equals to cost at anytime, the more advanced your solutions are the higher your investment and the operational cost.

Solar power does not work at night - fix it=storage / networkstransfer - costs money
Wind power does not work when no wind blows - fix it=storage / networkstransfer - costs huge amounts of money

Re:windturbines btw. 3-6 months

[angel'o'sphere]

- yes you can store pv energy as H2 / but any given process comes with a loss
- yes you can store wind energy as H2 / but any given process comes with a loss
- energy storage is very expensive

You don't store the H2, you feed it into the gas grid.
When you "want it back" you simply consume gas from the gas companies (surprisingly the local utility likely also provides gas, so for them it is a kind of "zero sum" game).

Re:Assumptions

[duckintheface]

I live in the most energy efficient house in my county, based on good insulation, solar heating, and thermal mass. We just retrofitted my daughter's house (built in 1968) with insulation in attic, walls and crawl space. Nobody is wearing thermal underwear. Nobody is uncomfortable. And we are saving lots of money by NOT using energy. But "cheap" energy undercuts such efforts. The payback time is too long for most folks if energy stays cheap. But energy is only cheap if you ignore the cost of environmental damage. If that damage were included on your power bill each monty, insulation and solar power would look pretty good.

From the article: "Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs, "

But nuclear power is neither cheap nor reliable. So why do they suggest that as a replacement for renewables. As to the "fast enough" part of that, solar and wind can be ramped up much faster than nuclear. The rationale of the article is not logical.

Might be a hoax

[gbnewby]

I think this could be a hoax. It's not a scientific paper, not in a peer-reviewed journal's letter section. It appears via a Google circles posting from Kerry Emanuel who is a well-known, though partially reformed, climate denier. It looks like the Google+ account the letter is published in was just created. Plus, the facts are either skimpy & wrong. Saying we cannot ramp up solar & wind power fast enough, but can ramp up nuclear, is directly in opposition to what's happening. Solar installations are going up by double-digit percentage points each year, and meanwhile we haven't had a new nuclear power plant in over 40 years. The only pair that is underway (which is pictured in the Yahoo! story) is years from completion. There are only 19 permit applications active for new nukes in the US, and the power industry (which is notoriously risk-averse) has for decades shied away from their huge liability and expense.

Re:Might be a hoax

[sandytaru]

Thanks for articulating that - I was just thinking the same thing. Nuclear power plants are enormous infrastructure investments that require government levels of funding. Any average Joe can invest $10K into solar panels and be off the grid forever. I can't go out and buy $10K worth of a personal nuclear reactor (No Mr Fusions here) and I never will be able to.

Re:thorium OR ???

[geoskd]

Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.

No, renewables can't meet the demand today, and possibly never will. You have made the classic mistake of assuming your experience is typical of everything everywhere. A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time. Even with neighborhood wind turbines, you will not cover 100% of the power needs. Now consider that household power only accounts for 21% of the U.S. energy consumption. The overwhelming majority comes from industrial and commercial power use which has a much higher land density, and simply cannot be covered in any meaningful way with solar or wind power. Now you're back to needing industrial scale power generation which requires massive amounts of land for the scale required by industry and you're back to needing big again. If you covered the entire island of Manhattan (every square inch of exposed surface) with solar panels, you would only add up to about 1/4 of the total power demand. Sure you have lots of open space in Arizona, but you have to get the power from Arizona to Manhattan and its just not that simple. Also, how much deforestation are you willing to undertake to supply the energy needs of industrialized nations?

You are a very large part of the problem. Your arguments are bunk and fail to stand up to the realities of the world, and yet on the surface sound plausible enough to convince at least three moderators to mod you up on Slashdot (which I like to think has a smarter than average population). You and your ilk will have us so paralyzed following dead end projects that we'll all end up cooked thoroughly from global warming before any one of you will even be willing to concede that you're not half as smart as you think you are.

A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world tells you that renewables cannot be made sufficient to stop global warming, and you are going to tell the rest of us that they are wrong because of your own anecdotal experience? I think its high time we started calling your type out for the BS you're spewing.

Are they volunteering to clean up Fukushima?

[leftie]

This is so important they are personally volunteering to clean-up the mess left by the disaster at Fukushima? Right?

Oh... they NOT volunteering to clean up any of the radioactive mess caused by Fukushima.

Re:Assumptions

[Jmc23]

The basic problem with conservation and demand being reduced by increased cost, is that THE USA will go to war over energy concerns.

There, fixed that for you.

Stuck with Renewables ?

[burni2]

You make it sound like it's bad to rely on renewable energy, but all your arguments actually strongly support renewable energy:

- short return of invest / return of energy / low investment cost

- technology is state of the art and not something that only ran in a lab or in virtual reality

- you also bring up the best argument in favor of diverse renewables "1/3 transportation runs 99.9% on hydrocarbons", good when photovoltaic and wind are used for generating electricity, the methane can power your truck.

But there is really not enough biomass without getting into food conflicts, but you can also power transportation with electricity and that works. (there are electrical
powered busses, they are mostly connected to power lines and not on batteries (capacity problem solved) and the line grabbing and releasing is automatized.
Think of a highway with a lane soley for trucks getting there power from grid lines. Yes infracstructure would have to be built, but even in the case you go all nuclear, you would need to find a fix for that same problem.

Ohh now I get it. You think the hippies won and are a foul loser now.. ok, from this perspective: We are really stuck with renewables!

Re:Stuck with Renewables ?

[BlueTemplar]

No, my point is that it's too late for nuclear, fossil fuels are either getting unaffordable and/or cannot be burned for much longer without causing catastrophic climate change, so we're only left with renewables to power whatever is left off of our civilization once the rubble of the next oil shock stops bouncing.

Electricity won't be able to power transportation (of the globalized kind like we have now) because that would require an investment even greater than new nuclear reactors.

key concept: "free reign to use nuclear power"

[globaljustin]

I know Pakistan (and probably a good chunk of the countries I mentioned) have nuclear power. IRAN has nuclear power...

In case you missed it, we have severe UN limitations, with controversial high stakes inspections, on the use of...

IAEA

it's about letting the technology flower globally **without** causing more problems...

also, I spent my formative years as a Tennessee redneck so I can talk as much shit about Kentucky rednecks as I want!

Clarke's first law

[riverat1]

I call Clarke's first law on this:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Re:thorium OR ???

[Jmc23]

You do know that those highly educated people saying renewables can't sustain us is because they know that a large part of the population is too stupid and wasteful to reduce energy expenditure to reasonable levels. Besides that 'fact', it is doable.

Really, it's not the posters fault that he hasn't realized the stupidity of those around him.

You know how much energy could be saved if companies turned their lights out at night? Unfortunately, you guys are a bunch of savages that would gut every single one of those business.

Re:thorium == wealth creation via cheaper energy

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.

Okay say wind and solar $10k either way. You sound like someone who might have $10k in the bank. I say that gently with the utmost respect. Congratulations!

But you have to realize that in order to truly declare that these things have the 'capability', everyone must somehow ante-up the amount required, which they cannot... so your ability to pay will naturally result in the subsidizing of your neighbor's 'share'. Somehow.

There is a great value to be self-sufficient, but real grid solutions must be on the scale of whole {cities,states,countries,continents}. I sympathize with the sell-back fees, that whole "sell power back" idea was conceived with good intentions and sold long before the technical and liability issues were settled.

Even as a home owner on the road to complete energy self-sufficiency, your fate is bound with that of those around you. People who live hand to mouth in crackerbox apartments and trailer parks, your on-grid neighbors, and the vast majority of people who consider the electricity problem solved when (and if) they can afford to pay the bill. I barely can and I work for the city.

What this means is that everyone -- including yourself and myself, must come together to decide what is the best way to power the grid to resolve this crisis. We must do it in such a way that it will benefit everyone and bring the billed cost-per-KwH down substantially.

Reducing the cost of living is the same as creating wealth, in fact it is the best and only sustainable way to create wealth.

The grid must become the priority, be healed first. Otherwise those individuals who achieve self-sufficiency would become islands in the darkness as the grid fails and everyone else will naturally be drawn to the light. That would be a dangerous thing.

___
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

concussion controversy

[globaljustin]

I see what you're saying...you know all analogies have areas where you can poke holes...

however its an obvious logical example to support the idea that Americans know, love, and can create conditions for the 'proper' competition I described above

league politics aside, the very nature of sports is to be a pure meritocracy and the fans demand it

to falsify my point, about 10 years ago or so the Japanese Yokozuna Sumo wresting 'big league' was exposed to have been fixing and scripting matches up to the championship for years...

it was a terrible blow to the sport...at the time it was looked at as sort of a pure representation of traditional Japanese culture...a modern continuation of ancient competition...

if that happened in the NFL...if it was revealed to be fixed and scripted like the WWF **all hell would break loose** people would fuckign loose their minds with anger...the concussion cover-up thing would be nothing compared to that!

and that proves my point...Americans know and love pure competition within strict boundaries...the way the NFL regulates the game (with official video review, etc) is a good analogy

Re:concussion controversy

[tragedy]

league politics aside, the very nature of sports is to be a pure meritocracy and the fans demand it

Just picture me figuratively rolling around on the floor laughing for 10 minutes. The fans only demand meritocratic fairness when it's to their team's advantage. If the opposing team is obviously being treated unfairly, they tend to gloat.

if that happened in the NFL...if it was revealed to be fixed and scripted like the WWF **all hell would break loose** people would fuckign loose their minds with anger...the concussion cover-up thing would be nothing compared to that!

Well, first of all. Numerous NFL games have been documented as fixed. Aside from that though, the NFL is explicitly an "entertainment" company. The likelyhood of the NFL not being rigged is lower than the likelyhood that they aren't. As an aside, the players are also pretty much all certain to be on performance enhancing drugs.

Re:Assumptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I for one am against the freedom of "free to piss into common drinking water well" kind!
Whoever confuses personal commodity with freedom deserves none!

Re:Assumptions

[Mashiki]

Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.

Really? Perhaps you can explain why then where "conservation" is heavily pushed, and renewable are also being heavily pushed the price of electricity has skyrocketed. There's nothing "cheap" about that.

Re:Assumptions

[hairyfeet]

I'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. The ones using the most wasteful energy can WELL afford any bullshit price hikes you an come up with, won't stop Rev Al Gore from farting around in a one man lear jet or having a fleet of SUVs like he's El Presidente, the ONLY ONES that price hikes hurt are the ones who can least afford it and who AL.READY CONSERVE and that is of course the poor.

I've said it before and I'll say it again the answer is NOT price hikes, just the opposite in fact, its making better choices cheap enough the masses can easily afford it. Why does the USA use so much gas? Because the average MPG is just 14 here, but why? Because the poor can only afford used cars for the most part and the cheapest ones are also piggies. What you need is a "people's car/truck" that runs on diesel so you can switch to biofuels when they are viable, gets a minimum of 40MPG and cots no more than $20K and then use "cash for clunkers" style program along with subsidies to get the poor out of the old gas hogs.

But I just love how the greenies want to fuck everybody with price hikes because THEY can afford them while ignoring that even a 40c a gallon gas hike raises the cost of food enough that more Americans will be going hungry. When you add to that a right wing owned by the "let 'em die!" teabaggers trying to gut food stamps and any other aid to the poor a price hike is the LAST fucking thing we need, too many are already going hungry as it is.

Re:Assumptions

[duckintheface]

... They question for society is do you actively hurt people who are still living in old houses by interfering in the energy economy to force certain behavior form them? I think that kind of environmentalism is immoral and despicable, people who support it whether they admit it or not are anit-freedom.

That's what conservation subsidies and tax credits are all about. When we insulated my daughter's house this year, about 1/3rd of the cost was covered by tax credits and a subsidy funded by the stimulus money appropriated in 2009. If you don't want to hurt people, you will be concerned about the long term effects of climate change and the effects of nuclear meltdowns. Ask the people in Alaska who are being disposessed by melting sea ice and massive winter storms washing their houses (that have been there for generations) into the sea. Ask the people in Fukushima.

What Do You Do With The Waste?

[bobwalt]

Even with Thorium there are waste products that have a half life far longer than the entire recorded history of the human race. We can not comprehend that kind of time frame let alone adequately store waste safely for that period. Just look at how the waste was stored at Fukushima. Solve the waste problem then fission reactors become useful.

Re:thorium OR ???

[pla]

A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time.

The sun always shines somewhere. The wind always blows somewhere. And the tides ebb and flow with the regularity of... Well, of the tides.


Now consider that household power only accounts for 21% of the U.S. energy consumption.

So every household needs to make 5x as much as they use. Hey, there you have an opportunity for the utilities to stay relevant - Pay me to install more capacity than I need, and sell the excess to industry.


Sure you have lots of open space in Arizona, but you have to get the power from Arizona to Manhattan and its just not that simple.

'Fusion" counts as hard in the sense of "we don't quite know how to do it yet".

A superconducting cable from the Mojave to Manhattan amounts to a mere matter of logistics. We have a known solution. We know how to build that solution. Doing so would cost less than many of our foreign boondoggles. The only real "limitation" to doing so amounts to debates over NIMBY and profit sharing.

Pave Death Valley with solar panels. The rest amounts to political pissing contests.


A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world

I can find you "four prominent scientists" who believe that God created mankind, who roamed the planet concurrent with the dinosaurs, 6000 years ago. Argument from authority doesn't validate; and when the argument flies directly counter to what anyone can plainly see for themselves, that argument has a higher than normal burden of proof.

If you want to tell me the world doesn't have enough gallium to pave Death Valley with CIGS-based PV panels, we can work with that. "Dr. So-and-so said so!", however, doesn't amount to squat.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

Even with current energy demand (and growth similar in futur like now) the energy easily can be generated with renewables. My fridge simply does not care whether the current comes from a coal plan, a nuclear plant or a solar plant.

It is only big energy / oil companies blocking the way to energy conservation and renewables.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

You can conserve energy by insulating your house better.
By having your own washing machine instead of driving once a week the the washing shop.
By opening the window at the correct time of the day instead of running your AC around the clock etc etc.
There are hundrets of ways to reduce energy usage without losing any comfort.

Re:Assumptions

[geoskd]

The basic problem with conservation and demand being reduced by increased cost, is that THE USA will go to war over energy concerns.

There, fixed that for you.

Nice try, but the only real difference between the USA and any other nation in this regard is $1 Trillion USD in defense spending...

Really, this is a complex problem

[cbarcus]

All that "math and science and graphs and studies..." contain the crucial details necessary for understanding this complex issue. Not everyone is going to be able to participate in a coherent fashion, but the choice of nuclear fission for dealing with this situation is not a political choice- it is merely practical. The public's dissatisfaction with the current line of nuclear plant technology is somewhat akin to disliking an early, expensive, and unsafe car. It is not representative of the quality and value that is possible with this type of energy. There is very good reason to believe that with adequate funding and a decent design, nuclear fission is very suitable for powering the globe's economy.

The issues with fusion are manifold ranging from very immature technology to high costs. It may come to pass that fusion may one day be a practical source of energy, suitable for running the economy, but that is clearly no where near the case today. Today we must choose wisely, and wisdom dictates that we tackle the design issues related to nuclear fission. Molten salt reactors hold incredible promise, and should go a great way in making this energy source not only very safe, efficient, affordable and practical, but even desirable.

Our goal is 50 terawatts by 2050 (~17 TW are produced today), which means we'll have to get to the point where we can manufacture power plants similarly to how we build airliners. Imagine compact, high temperature reactors that can fit on the bed of a typical semi to be delivered via common roads to dry areas where ambient air is utilized for the cooling system. This is the kind of vision that can produce the throughput necessary for our needs. Reactor efficiency can greatly reduce the volume of waste, and a sensible disposal system can sequester that unwanted byproduct in deep boreholes. Many more details which I won't get into here, but it would be prudent to not be so dismissive of what the informed have to say on this subject.

Far better to have safer plants

[cbarcus]

With the right nuclear fission technology, it may be practical to integrate power plants right into urban areas. Besides, locating the power near to where it is going to be consumed is considerably more efficient. There are ways to dramatically improve the reliability, maintainability, and safety of nuclear fission power generation, and in fact it is necessary for reducing costs. Better to tackle the problem head on than to merely react and accept the current state of the industry.

Re:Far better to have safer plants

[BlueTemplar]

Lol, do you really think that the population is going to accept having their homes heated by hot water that is linked, even if not directly, to a nuclear power plant?

Re:Far better to have safer plants

[cbarcus]

Yes, once the general public begins to understand the nature of our predicament. And strictly speaking, water is not necessary for power generation, though it is of course used with common LWRs. High temperature systems can use other heat transfer mediums like CO2 or He. Ambient air cooling systems are known as "dry cooling" within the industry, and will be necessary to use to increase production (water supplies are already under strain).

Global energy production is on the order of 17 terawatts which brings the per capita average to about 2 kW. The US average is over 10 kW. This is quite significant as it affects individual freedom, the quality of food available, affordable goods and services, etc. Encouraging energy use is the primary method for reducing poverty, so of course it is necessary to not only increase the usefulness of energy already delivered (through efficiency), but also to increase the quantity. Just to bring per capita use up to 5 kW by 2050 will require producing about 3 times as much as what we produce today. Considering that in addition to that we must completely eliminate fossil fuel use, quite a formidable challenge awaits us.

There really is no alternative as renewables are not a realistic option for our predicament: we must eliminate fossil fuel usage while drastically reducing the cost of that energy (in terms of energy return over energy invested). Trying to do this with low density sources (renewables) will only promote environmental destruction and continue our dependence upon fossil fuels (estimates for the cost of this kind of infrastructure conservatively runs into the 100s of $trillions and is very likely completely impractical at scale). Current renewable equipment prices are not a true measure of the actual cost in terms of energy, and indicates very little of what happens when the industrial system tries to use renewable energy as a manufacturing base (the cost will drastically rise while the return will plummet).

Truly, the issue is quite complicated and no laughing matter. If it were not for some very poor political decisions made decades ago, we might already have applicable technology available today, but now we must educate the public and then embark upon an aggressive development program to try and minimize the damage while mitigating future risk.

And of course, there is no guarantee that we will avoid catastrophe as the risks we currently face are quite formidable. Nuclear fission only gives civilization its best shot.

Re:Far better to have safer plants

[BlueTemplar]

Once the general public (of the rich countries) begins to understand the nature of our predicament it will be too late, because they will only understand it once they start lacking electric power / heating / food (and even then it might be blamed on something else). By that point it will be even less politically viable to divert energy from these energy issues to plan long-term infrastructure like new design nuclear plants that only will be ready in 10+ years.

For the same reason, the lowered dependence upon fossil fuels will only happen because they will become unaffordable (hopefully that will happen before catastrophic climate change sets in). If people (and industries) were willing to reduce the fossil fuels usage, then we would already have a worldwide taxation of fossil fuels. What we have instead is a positive net sum of subventions to fossil fuels.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

You assume that there is a "market" that decides that the "cheapest energy" will win in the long run.
That is wrong on two scales.
First of all there is no market. Everything right now was casked in concrete over the previous 50 or more years mainly by government interests.
So in the actual situation a 30 year old nuclear plant produces energy relatively cheap (but not as cheap as you might think: maintanace and fuel costs and waste storage still cost money).
A new build nuclear plant would produce energy very expenisve, much more expensive than wind e.g.
You mix up scaling factors.
A new build nuclear plant, if we start today with the planning, will be ready in 15 years, at the soonest, if no court or other interference kills it mid term. That means we have a delay of 15 years to scale up in energy production by 4 - 6 GW. Or a similar delay in replacing a similar amount of coal power.
Wind and solar on the other hand makes it easy to connect power generation in small chunks to the grid continiously.
I can plan for a 4GW wind farm and comnect it while I build it in 100MW chunks to the grid. So instead of waiting 15 years for a new nuclear plant TO HAVE ANY EFFECT I have an imediate effect if I build wind and solar plants.
And obviously: a new build wind/solar plant generates energy cheaper than a new build nuclear plant.

Re:Assumptions

[HiThere]

Wrong assumptions? When I look at political choices being made today those seem the correct assumptions.

FWIW, yes, renewables could handle things. But you'd need a lot of them. If they got the kind of government subsidy that oil and coal get there'd be no problem, but they don't benefit big business, so that's probably not in the cards. Nuclear already has many large business supporting it, so it can be pushed, if people will just stop fighting it.

Unfortunately, when there's a problem with nuclear, the result is VERY expensive. So expensive the the companies that build the plants refuse to build them unless relieved of the responsability. Getting rid of waste is an unsolved problem. (Not insoluble, unsolved...and nobody is willing to work on a solution. IIRC fast breeders could burn radioactive waste down to nearly background level, but they can also build fission bomb materials.) So I have a VERY hard time supporting nuclear. If the companies that built the plants thought they were safe enough that they didn't need government guarantees that they wouldn't be held responsible, I might change my mind. If, also, the waste problem was reasonably solved (by which I *DON'T* mean burying it in a subduction trench), I might change my mind...though I not at all sure that I'd like fast breeders to be the solution. More along the lines of miniature power generators. Probably a difficult problem. Medical isotopes is another small use. Etc.

Their point of view is understandable. Nuclear is much more likely to get enough support among the powers. But until a bunch of outstanding problems are solved, I don't see how *I* can support it.

But don't say he used the wrong number. Given the current political power structure those are probably the right numbers.

Re:Assumptions

[DamonHD]

There are ways to look after the poor without encouraging profligacy with energy.

We do it already: this really isn't black and white.

One way is to keep the first kWh cheap and have a rising block price per kWh against usage: if you're not running a McMansion with the windows wide open in winter you need never hit the punitive tariff bands. Just for example.

Or directly subsidise the energy bills of the poor. Take taxes from the top end (of energy usage or general taxation) to compensate.

I'm a fairly right-wing (at least by EU standards) investment banker "greenie" and I have no desire to mess up anybody else's life, including those further down the line when we've burnt way more fossil fuels than was in any way necessary and (a) certainly squandered the cheap stuff and (b) possibly ruined the climate.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

The energy price is skyrockimg because the energy companies SIMPLY INCREASE THE PRICE.
And customers have no option to switch to another supplier.
And: customers if they could switch, are to lazy to do so.
I could cut my electric bill by 300$ a year, since roughly 3 years. I was to lazy to do so, because I have to "work" 3h to do the paper work. But now as I remember this I perhaps should do it.

Re:Assumptions

[chill]

If you think that's a fix, you are supremely ignorant of both history and current events.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

Your assumption that it is only practical with nuclear power is wrong on many frontiers.
Japan is a 1st world country and can not handle the aftermath of Fukushima. The Soviet Union is minimum 2nd wordl, if not 1st world as well and can mot handle the aftermath of Chernobyl.
So, you want now nuclear power in the hands of 2nd and 3rd world nations? What exactly is practical about this? Where do you get the workers managing the plants?
The next thing about practical is: you have no clue about how an electric power grid operates. Or how a juclear plant actually works. It is pretty hard to run a grid with more than 50% nuclear power. The reason is if a plant gets powered up about certain ranges it is pretty difficult to power it down (quickly) in other words you can not use it good as a load following plant. The same is true in reverse, if you have powered down a nuclear plant to react on a power fluctuation, it takes hours or days that you are able to power it up again, so you can ot follow the load.

So, NO: there is absolutely nothing "practical" in building nuclear plants in 2nd and 3rd world nations. And there is also nothing practical in increasing the amount of nuclear plants e.g. in the USA.

Re:thorium OR ???

[angel'o'sphere]

Of course industrial demand can be covered with solar and wind.

The steel smelter does not care if the 6GW it is draining is supplied by a wind farm.

Your claims are just ridiculous and you lack basic understanding. You don't even give one financial or scientific reason why a wind farm can notnprovide power for the industries, sorry but your claims as well as those of other nonsense posters here are "just uneducated opinions" ... why don't you read up a bit about power production and how grids and power plants work?

Re:Assumptions

[russotto]

Raising the price of energy would help push people away from the stupidity of the first of those (yes, some do), to be just as comfortable and healthy on much less. I've easily managed to halve my energy use while adding two children to my household: it is depressing that some will not even try at the risk of damning their successors...

Hey, I can do that too. Just let me know when you're going to do the baseline measurement so I can turn the heat and the A/C on at the same time during that period. The point being that conservation when you're wasteful is easy; conservation when you're not is not. Try cutting your energy use in half AGAIN without sacrificing comfort.

Yes, there are people who leave the heat on and open the windows when they get too hot. Mostly tenants who aren't paying for the heat and may not even have any real control over it. Raise energy prices, and rents will go up, but the stupidity will remain.

Sure, I've got an 80% efficient furnace. A 95% efficient furnace would save me about $150/year. Between furnace costs and installation costs (a condensing furnace requires a new vent and a condensate drain and pump), it would pay for itself in just a few years more than the expected lifetime of the furnace (ignoring time value of money). You'd have to increase energy costs by a huge amount for that to make any sense.

Er..

[mrmangosir559]

Back hander from the power contractors. Germany aren't doing that bad..

Re:thorium OR ???

[Oakey]

How many solar panels would be required to 'pave over death valley'? Millions? Billions? how many miles of cable would be required? How long would this feat take? So long that by the time you install the last panel you're having to replace the first again? If you're going to make a suggestion like that, how about you include some math to show this is actually possible? I'll get you started, Death Valley is 3000square miles. Off you go.

(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[burni2]

ok I will lay this out short. this is the pretext you need to understand and asses my view on the topic of renewable energy and on things that sound easy:

1.) I'm a mechanical engineer (with electrical knowledge)
2.) I do work in the wind industry, I do sometimes climb on wind turbines, also Offshore
3.) I know how wind turbine generators work from the inside out
4.) I have a deeper understanding about things like grid codes, grid compliance, reactive power demand & generation, the need for those
5.) I have experience in working safety / I have written safety assessments / done risk assessments / done last minute risk assessments / 5 - stops
6.) But I also know that I'm not perfect and sometimes will make an error, and that there is no perfect or ideal world

Do believe me when I state this from my experience with safety:

- In engineering and science if something reads easy and safe from your office chair view, onsite reallity will change easy to hard and safe to unsafe.
- If you ignore that fact, as an engineer having to layout or assign work others execute on complex systems (in dangerous areas) you are a safety problem if you are not aware of your responsility to assess the real situation and not the situation you perceive from your office chair
- Do not ignore the human factor

Please guys, be realistic one time, fantasy and dream back and forth.

1.) renuclearization - won't happen on a large scale
there won't be a big program to go nulcear, if a country would really do that, they would be ridden with execessive cost (see actual building site in Finland, and take look at England)

Projection:
In seven years from now, the project in england will probably cost so much that there will be a pay partly off and walk away solution.

Thinkaboutit:
The fixed energy price for that new nuclear power plant in england is higher than the actual subsidies for wind energy, and the reactor will start operating 2025 or so .. when renewables are far more advanced and cheaper. That project won't pay off for the people only for the investors. And in England there is no real threat for nuclear energy through anti nuclear groups, the island is PRO-NUCLEAR (55% are PRO nuclear)

2.) Thorium

Projection: won't happen, too high costs

Thorium will be our saviour. - except that idea is pretty old, it predates the anti nuclear movement, so please cherish the fact that there might be a real world problem with going from drawing board and simulation to reallity, I think thorium reactors are a scientific dream, that when turned into reallity would turn into an engineers nightmare.

Projection:
What will happen ? Actually nobody knows.

But we see today that in some countries which have a huge amount of installed wind/solar/biomass power, that on certain times it happens that the
renewables generate about 50-90% of the needed electricity. That's good in the first place.

The "bitter" taste is.

The "dormant" coal fired power plants are still running and are paying to sell their electricty, because during several times the stock market price for electricity turns negative. As do nuclear power plants. Because in terms of controlability and medium reaction times power output coal is worse(we talk about hours) and nuclear is impossible (we talk about weeks!)

But what can be seen is a clear shift towards renewables, with - till there is no really cheap, small, availible, high power density method to store electricity - accomodation of the fossils(coal, oil, gas).

Convetional nuclear power due to it's bad controlabilty (not dynamic = bad) and long term nature is doomed to fade out over the next 15 - 25 years.

If you doubt my prognosis about nuclear power, please take a look at the figures of power plant projects (that do not get stalled in the planning phase)
Finnland actually builds a new reactor, it was planned 15-20yrs. ago, and the costs have rissen dramaticly, see for yourself at wikipedia. Even b

Re:(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[BlueTemplar]

Thank you for this post.
One comment though :
Fracked oil and gas is already being extracted faster than economically viable. The reason it will max out (and in about 4 years, not 20 years) is because the fracked wells, due to the geology/technology get depleted a lot faster than conventional wells.
Since you seem to be interested in the subject, I suggest you read this (and the following chapters) :
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-18/snake-oil-how-fracking-s-false-promise-of-plenty-imperils-our-future-introduction

Re:(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[nojayuk]

The strike price for the proposed 3.2GW Hinckley EFR project is about £95 per MWh i.e. the grid operators will pay that price for the electricity generated. The current strike price for offshore wind which the grid operators are required to buy due to Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs) is about £140 per GWh, about 50% higher. At the moment British consumers are paying about 15 pence per kWh which works out at £150 per MWh or nearly the base cost of offshore wind with no allowance for the cost of transmisison, grid support etc.

Coal generates the largest share of electricity in the UK with gas filling in the gaps. Our nuclear fleet runs flat-out (apart from scheduled maintenance downtimes) producing about 7GW and we buy in about a GW of nuclear power from France pretty much continuously. The rest is a small amount of hydro (less than a GW total) and a very variable amount of grid-connected wind -- right now it's producing about 2.3GW but a couple of weeks ago it was less than 50MW. Grid solar is not even noticeable on that scale.

The EPRs and other GenIIa and GenIII nuclear plants being built around the world are expected to operate for at least 60 years; this is a difficult proposition to finance in today's world of millisecond financial trading and live-or-die quarterly accountancy. They are national infrastructure rather than commercial operations and should realistically be looked upon as similar to, say, major highways and railroads, bridges, water supply systems etc.

Re:(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[amorsen]

Note that the strike price for the Hinckley project is guaranteed for 35 years and inflation adjusted. Offshore wind does not get 35 year guarantees. Also, the UK pays what must be the highest prices for offshore wind in the world. No one sane sets a guaranteed inflation adjusted electricity price for 35 years. In ten or twenty years when everyone else has cheap renewable power, the UK industry is stuck with unaffordable energy. Hinckley will be busy producing energy at night in the summer, still charging £95 per MWh for something with a value close to zero.

Re:(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[nojayuk]

Electricity demand at night in the summer in the UK is about 25-30GW; a lot of industry uses electricity overnight and its value is not zero. Nuclear plants run 24/7 unlike variable renewable generators so they don't need to have storage costs factored in. Of course the renewable generators don't pay for storage anyway, relying on baseload nuclear, coal and CCGT to fill in the times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.

As for cheap renewable power, the most expensive electricity for consumers in Europe in Germany which has the greatest penetration of renewable energy in its generating mix -- Germans pay about twice as much per kWh as British consumers or even the 80% nuclear French which is kind of strange given that Germany still generates about 50% of its electricity using cheap lignite and brown coal with a good helping of Russian gas to fill in the gaps.

Exactly when renewable energy will become cheap I don't know, it's getting to the point where the first generation of wind turbines built in the 1990s are being decommissioned and will need replacing, adding more capital costs to the generating budgets. I don't know who's going to fund the removal of obsolete wind turbines and remediation of the sites -- several wind farm operators have gone conveniently bust before those costs hit the balance sheet.

Re:(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[Megane]

The japanese are perfecstionists

Sorry, you had me until that. The Japanese are also masters at not questioning authority, looking the other way, and pretending everything is fine to save face.

Re:(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[angel'o'sphere]

relying on baseload nuclear, coal and CCGT to fill in the times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.
That is nonsense.
Perhaps /. posters should refrain from using the term baseload altogether? No one seems to get what it means.
Baseload: the amount of power you always feed into the grid, regardless of demand. This is a _FIXED_ percentage of your "average" peak load. In germany it is around 40%
So: how can solar and wind rely on something that is NEVER CHANGING? Baseload is not _increased_ when a solar plant reduces its output!!! It STAYS the same, hint: that is the reason why it is called _baseload_.

Germany generated about 40% of its power from brown coal.

Re:(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[nojayuk]

In the UK where I live coal generation output doesn't fluctuate much, just when plants are taken offline for scheduled downtime so it's fair to call it baseload, same as the nuclear plants since they're so cheap to run in terms of fuel cost per kWh generated.

Wind generating capacity goes up and down with the weather -- a few weeks ago the national grid was getting 50MW from grid-connected wind during a quiet period, a few days ago in the aftermath of a storm is was producing 5GW or a hundred times as much. CCGT is used for peaking to fill in the gaps plus a couple of interconnectors bringing in power from France (80% nuclear low-cost electricity) and the Netherlands (cheap gas generating capacity) pretty much steady-state. Solar doesn't account for much as you might expect this far north.

Re:(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[angel'o'sphere]

In the UK where I live coal generation output doesn't fluctuate much, just when plants are taken offline for scheduled downtime so it's fair to call it baseload, same as the nuclear plants since they're so cheap to run in terms of fuel cost per kWh generated.
No it is not "fair" to call it baseload as those plants will power down significantly over night. That means: they don't provide baseload.

Re:(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[nojayuk]

No the coal stations don't power down significantly overnight. The CCGT systems do wind up and down significantly over a daily cycle, not so much with coal. A quick check shows that over the last 24 hours in the UK coal has delivered between 14GW and 16GW, nuclear has been steady at just over 7GW, CCGT has swung between 3GW and 20GW and wind between 2GW and 4GW.

There are Europe-wide carbon-emission restrictions on generation from some older coal plants meaning they can only operate for a limited number of hours each year; these stations are being cycled up and down as necessary to reduce their total burn time but the newer stations outside that restriction run balls-to-the-wall to provide baseload absent outages for refurbishment.

Re:(Renewable) Energy MIX someone ?

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry, then I missinterpreted your previous post.

Re:Assumptions

[grumling]

That 15 year timeline is 100% political. There's no engineering reason for a nuclear power plant to take 15 years to construct.

And that 4GW of intermittent power that you're adding incrementally has to be backed up by natural gas turbine generation.

Re:thorium OR ???

[ultranova]

At least until we get affordable supercaps that hold somewhere on the order of 50KWH.

But would you really want a device that can store 180MJ and release it pretty much instantaneously in case of a malfunction in your house?

Re:Assumptions

[grumling]

Oil companies are also natural gas companies. They love renewables because next to every wind farm is a gas turbine generating station, which is used during the 70% of the time the wind isn't blowing enough to produce electricity.

Re:thorium OR ???

[Applehu Akbar]

Let's assume you can find enough money to make this produce usable amounts of power. How long before the flat-earth lobby starts accusing you of having started Destructive Hurricane X by "slowing down the ocean currents?" The hurricane need not be anywhere near your plant. If you innovate, it was your fault.

Re:thorium == wealth creation via cheaper energy

[HiThere]

It's lots more complicated than that. E.g., most people don't live the places they live in.

That said, more complicated doesn't mean it can't be done, it means the incentives aren't straightforward. Additionally, despite people wanting to think about doing it on a small scale, that's not a complete solution. You still need the grid (as you recognized). In fact a distributed power generation system requires a better grid, one that is less subject to fluctuations. (A solar storm possibility also makes that a necessity. The current grid wouldn't survive a hit by a major solar storm.) There need to be fast acting and capacious buffer capacitors. There needs to be distributed power storage. (Water towers that you pump up when there's excess power, and drain when the power level is low is one good choice, that you can use when there's noting else available...even if you need to cart in the water. It's not great, as you can't store large amounts of power that way at a reasonable price, but it's a multiple use storage system, Etc,

And for the large installations, we don't use solar cells, we use mirrors, and turbines. I doubt that solar cells will improve enough that that's not a better solution. (The mirrors heat a working fluid which is stored until needed. So it's an energy storage system combined with solar power.) And you don't use Death Valley, you use the Mojave Desert. You'll need more stuff than would easily fit into Death Valley, and it's not really a very good place for solar. It gets hot, yes, but it's a VALLEY, which means that it's only bright part of the day. (Well, I may be wrong about that last, but Death Valley retains heat, it no brighter than the surrounding countryside.)

Solar->thermal->hot fluid->turbine generator is the way for a large installation to work. (I'm pretty sure turbine is the correct generator), and that depends on a large thermal delta between the working fluid and the local environment. (So you need to have shade, and desire a mild wind.) But it comes with a built in time delay that can be stretched for weeks with good thermal insulation. This probably couldn't come on-line quite as fast as a gas generator, but probably faster than coal.

OTOH, one shouldn't be too focused on one particular modality. Wind has a lot going for it, but there needs to be a way to store the power generated. So far the only proposals I've encountered involved pumping water uphill (or into a pressurized container). And those can be difficult to implement. (Well, small water towers are pretty easy, but also don't store much.) Hydro is already pretty well developed, but we don't have many "mill pond" they hydro power sources, and we certainly could. It's a stable source of power, but each individual one wouldn't be large. (OTOH, it might well interfere with fish spawning...though the "mill pond" itself can raise fish of a different kind.)

This could go on for a long time, and I bet it's already TL;DR for most people.

Re:Assumptions

[Spykk]

By your logic a single potato will be "enough" so I guess energy is a solved problem. Great work everyone, we can all go home.

Re:Assumptions

[grumling]

"Can't handle?" What does that mean?

You do realize that 90% of what you hear about Fukushima in the news is BS, right? You realize that the source of your information is heavily funded (through advertising) by the same people who will directly benefit (via increased use of natural gas for electricity production) in reduced nuclear power use?

The media isn't exactly smart, but they know not to piss off the money people.

Re:Assumptions

[mcvos]

There are still tons of ways to conserve energy without having to live in the cold. Europe and the US are really enormously wasteful with energy. Better insulation can save a lot of energy. More efficient cars. LED lighting. Smarter lighting that turns off when nobody is using it. Or, you know, just turning the light off yourself when you leave a room (for some mysterious reason my parents always leave the light on in their garage and I can't get them to stop).

And then there's the tremendous amount of food that we simply throw away. Now there's a serious case of wastefulness. That food used space and sunlight, probably a lot of chemicals, was harvested, transported, processed, transported again, possibly cooked, and then thrown away for no benefit to anyone. And if it was meat, it went through this process a dozen times over. We need to stop wasting food.

Also, energy prices have some breakpoints that sometimes lead to industries having to waste energy to save money. There's a lot of really stupid waste out there that has nothing to do with giving up anything you actually need.

Re:Assumptions

[grumling]

Insurance for nuclear power plants is set up by the government, but it is funded by the plant operators:

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/funds-fs.html

It is true there's a top limit per incident, but that's true of any insurance policy.

The real problem is the high cost of energy

[cbarcus]

High levels of poverty is a result of high energy costs. Unfortunately, we do not have anything currently that can replace the low cost and convenience of fossil fuels. Renewable sources require equipment manufactured with primarily non-renewable sources to keep the costs down. This is a really bad place to be, and the real risk civilization faces here can not be underestimated.

To get out of this mess, we must dramatically lower the cost of clean energy, which will require massive innovation within the nuclear sector. There is simply no lower risk alternative, but the public remains superstitious with regards to radioactivity, the nuclear industry entrenched with obsolete technology, and nearly everyone remains mired in confusion when it comes to the fundamental relationship between energy production and poverty. We are not in an enviable situation, but it is conceivable that we can innovate ourselves out of this position with sufficient focus on the right kinds of energy-dense solutions. Molten salt reactor technology, pioneered in the 60s with a very successful prototype, remains are best hope in addressing the costs and liability associated with nuclear fission power production.

There will be no "new economy" without a new industrial revolution fueled by a new generation of low cost and easily deployable nuclear power plants. That is the realization that the public must come to if we are to overcome our current crisis. Not addressing this challenge appropriately can easily bring about conflicts far worse than what was experienced in the first half of the twentieth century (the world wars).

Re:Assumptions

[DamonHD]

The baseline measurement would be the historical average values for a household in your area, maybe of your size.

And by the way I cut from >2x normal to 0.5x normal for electricity by that metric. While adding two kids to the house.

Halving again would be relatively easy in good housing stock such as PassiveHaus, but I have the house that I have for now.

Actually I *am* aiming to make it possible to reduce heat demand (again) by a factor of two with my FOSS 'smart zoning' project for which I have a small trial running this winter to see if my ideas stack up. The aim is to in fact improve comfort at the same time.

I *am* suggesting that people using (say) 4x the mean per person pay (say) 10x or more per unit, a little like the TEQ (Tradeable Emissions Quotas) concept, and I'd not necessarily have a cap (ie the multiplier continues to rise with total amount used) to ensure that even the top 1% would notice.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Assumptions

[DamonHD]

Says the cheap troll.

Actually adding children at just below replacement rate to contribute to a gentle deflation of population is the smart thing to do for me and for society.

So you do the shutting up, please, and learn some manners.

Rgds

Damon

A best nuclear power will be a niche solution .

[InterGuru]

For 2008, the average worldwide generated electric power is in the order of 5 TW. . This is estimated to increase at the rate of 2.2 percent per year from 2010 to 2040 .

This means will need to increase generation capacity by about 110 Gigawatts per year. If we generously assume that each nuclear power plant generates 1 GW, to supply all the increase from nuclear generation we will need to open a new plant about every three days. Given the immense cost, complexity and large delays associated with construction of new nuclear plants there is no way we we get close to that number.

Re:Assumptions

[maxwell demon]

Yeah, those flat panels are so much worse than the old energy-sucking CRTs. And those better isolated houses are so uncomfortable ... </sarcasm>

Your mistake is that you assume saving energy necessarily means using less energy. It can just mean letting less energy escape unused.

Re:Assumptions

[F34nor]

The Al Gore rant is Stawman argument; no bearing on the parent.

As to the poor you can offset that with subsidies. If we simply cut the tax cuts for oil companies we could pay for retrofitting a huge umber of houses. in 2011 exon made 9,910 million dollars they paid 39 million on taxes at rate of .4%. At 33% that would be 3231 million in additional revenue. That's a lot of passive solar and window retro fits.

Re:thorium OR ???

[ilsaloving]

Please don't handwave "logistics" as if it's triviality. Logistics is a significant issue, IMO bigger than generating the power to begin with.

You say we can just lay down lots of superconducting cable? A quick google search tells me that last year, the "worlds largest" installation of superconducting cable was being deployed. How big is "worlds largest"? One kilometer.

For a long time now, we've had the ability to generated power in a variety of different ways. Getting the power delivered exactly where and when it needs to be, is a different story, as is far from a 'known solution'.

Combine that with NIMBYs and such, I'm not optimistic that we can get our collective thumbs out and do what needs to be done. Hell, the gov't of Ontario managed to squander several hundred million dollars in an (successful) effort to satisfy said NIMBYers.

Re:Assumptions

[Gavagai80]

The poor are not people spending $20K on cars. And as a poor person driving a cheap 1998 car, it actually gets over 30 MPG. The bad fuel economy is middle class and wealthy people buying giant SUVs and pickups.

Re:Assumptions

[DamonHD]

The whole world is not like your local utility.

Actually the predominant rising cost in UK domestic energy is wholesale gas prices, as it happens.

And we have easy facilities to switch to other suppliers for free (and getting easier: the aim is a 24h switch time), though yes, people seem reluctant to actually bother to make the 10 minute phone call.

Rgds

Damon

It is about SPEED

[Artagel]

Hansen's principal point is moving fast enough. His point is that if you are too slow, certain irreversible things will happen. Therefore you have to go with currently executable plans. The United States went dam-happy after Hoover dam, so it is not like we have hydropower waiting to happen. Nuclear is the one thing that we can execute on large scales to provide 24x7x365 power for many nations right now.

Hansen's problems are not with leading engineers. They are with politicians, activists, amatueur busy-body fearmongers and their me-too hangers on. He thinks a tipping point is coming, and that the other side of that tipping point outweighs any worry you have about nuclear power. And you can theorize all you want about your solar panels, windmills, etc. Nuclear is what has been proven to provide a substantial portion of world power without carbon load.

He is not interested in theories. He is interested in precedented engineering. Nuclear provides 20% or so of electricity in the U.S. today, around 80% in France. There is no "renewable" that provides so much power to a major country today.

The fact is that a lot of the global warming band wagoners are only on board so they can bash the same enemies they have been bashing for 40 years. When they hear they have to team up with some of their old enemies or the world is going to flood, well, they get off the bandwagon. They do not give an actual rats ass about the planet. They forgot about it 30 years ago.

Re:thorium OR ???

[pla]

But would you really want a device that can store 180MJ and release it pretty much instantaneously in case of a malfunction in your house?

Considering that I already have a small refridgerator-sized energy storage device just outside my house that stores 9.7 GJ and can release it... If not instantly, in well under a minute anyway... Yeah, I don't really have a problem with that. :)

/ 100 gallon LPG tank, for those curious.

Re:thorium OR ???

[pla]

Please don't handwave "logistics" as if it's triviality. Logistics is a significant issue, IMO bigger than generating the power to begin with.

Fair point, but "hard" still beats "we don't currently know how to even do it".

I think, though, that I probably took the wrong approach with following the GP's lead about death vallet to Manhattan. A properly distributed grid doesn't require any such massive-scale superconducting long haul transmission lines - It simply requires average population density over an area to match its (very literal) shadow. Manhattan can't possibly make enough solar power to meet demand - But in a 50 mile radius of Manhattan, you have vast tracts of former farming wasteland, an ocean, a "long" island with high steady winds perfect for a turbine farm...

I don't mean to sound overly flippant here, but the problem largely amounts to one of will, not practicality.

Re:Assumptions

[Uberbah]

Really? Perhaps you can explain why then where "conservation" is heavily pushed, and renewable are also being heavily pushed the price of electricity has skyrocketed. There's nothing "cheap" about that.

Because responding to massive fires across entire regions is cheap, responding to cat 4 and 5 hurricanes is cheap, dealing with drought and dehydration from two months of over 100 degree days is cheap. Because spending over a trillion a year to subsidize the oil industry with "defense spending" in the ME and around the world is cheap.

Why don't you try looking past your nose to see how your low prices have high costs.

Why hasn't USD already failed?

[tepples]

Then Germany needs to start exporting to the United States and other markets outside the euro zone. The whole USA, roughly comparable in population to the euro zone, shares one dollar; why doesn't it collapse?

Re:Why hasn't USD already failed?

[rich_hudds]

Because Americans share a common language and sense of identity.

As a Brit I'm happy for the wealthier parts of my country to subsidise in various ways (including sharing a common currency) the less well off bits.

The problem with the Euro is that people from one country are not happy to subsidise other countries that they may perceive to be workshy.

The Euro will collapse at some point because Northern Europeans think that Southern Europeans are lazy.

Re:Assumptions

[TrekkieGod]

As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.

You can't save enough energy to compensate. Population in the 1960's, 3 billion. Population in 2000, 6 billion. Population now, 7 billion. Assuming we all cut our energy usage by half, which is outright insane, give it another 30 years and we're right back here. Except quality of life is much worse, because we're all using half the energy. That's if you don't count the effect of developing nations using more energy as they join the first world. You don't even need to rely on the population growth.

The real question is why do you oppose nuclear energy? Even if it's not wind turbine clean, it's cleaner than most energy used now, so it's a step in the right direction.

Here's the real plausible and sustainable plan of lowering total energy usage. Ignore individual energy usage. Individually, we should be double, tripling, quadrupling energy usage. After all, the goal for any individual is to live the most comfortable and fulfilling life he can. So, what do you do if you want to save the Earth? Just have less kids. You don't even need to have zero kids. Have 1. You're contributing to negative population growth which makes you not only carbon neutral but actually better than neutral, and once everyone starts doing so (and they will as global standards of living rises, as it's something that happens naturally to educated individuals with a high standard of living), population will go down, and total energy usage will drop even as individual energy usage skyrockets. Everyone's happy. In the meantime, we move to cleaner energy to support the population we have now.

In Germany I was told

[burni2]

that we would power our trains with electricity, but according to you this must be a hoax, I will take a train hop on the top and just test those insignificant "lines".

Ok, jokes aside, the railway is electrified, the locomotives using converter technology today are far more efficient than their diesel powered brothers. But the feasability of an electrified railway system depends largely on the climate and topological situation. But if you can electrify a railway system
you can use long range trolley trucks, but investment would be needed yes, but if extracting hydrocarbons from crude oil or producing these from secondary processes(fuel synthesis) than those investments would be undertaken.

But you are right if you refer to long range or over the ocean transportation
- ships
- airplanes

Also but global transportation by ship, the average speed of the container freighters today decreased and is now the same as in the late 1800s of the sailing boats,
cause reduce fuel consumption.

Also why I think civilisation will not collapse
1.) 7 billion people and 5 billion living between the middleages and the early 19th century
2.) change happens but slowly
3.) price for energy rises, people react, example: in 2008 when the fuel prices reached 1970s - oil crisis levels the US-Americans(many) started to get away from their gasguzzling machines
4.) however: when the prices decrease because of the economic down turn, the gasguzzlers were back in business
5.) it's the price not laws

So rest assured civilisation will work.

Re:Assumptions

[Uberbah]

Even if your electric bill covers all the costs of construction, refinement, and ongoing safety and maintenance issues, which is doubtful, it does not cover the storage of waste for thousands of years.

And what's the weather like in your part of France? Do you have a couple months of subzero temperatures every winter, like the northern parts of the United States, and I don't just mean Alaska?

Re:thorium OR ???

[Uberbah]

You are a very large part of the problem. Your arguments are bunk and fail to stand up to the realities of the world, and yet on the surface sound plausible enough to convince at least three moderators to mod you up on Slashdot (which I like to think has a smarter than average population). You and your ilk will have us so paralyzed following dead end projects that we'll all end up cooked thoroughly from global warming before any one of you will even be willing to concede that you're not half as smart as you think you are.

Did you get a good look at the shark as you jumped over it?

Projection

[burni2]

I think he will say: Integrating dynamic resource like the renewables with base load - notstopable nuclear power plants - results in a facility near the nuclear power plants where 10000 people start 1000000 2000Watt water heaters simultainously to evaporate the excess power nobody really needs.

Under the bus!

[Tailhook]

His papers and his credibility have been discredited.

One wonders if Hansen is aware of exactly how much hate he is going to suffer by advocating something other than dirt floor yurts and hobby farms.

Re:Assumptions

[epyT-R]

ne way is to keep the first kWh cheap and have a rising block price per kWh against usage: if you're not running a McMansion with the windows wide open in winter you need never hit the punitive tariff bands. Just for example.

..and those bands will never change downward, right? RIGHT?! Riiight.

Or directly subsidise the energy bills of the poor. Take taxes from the top end (of energy usage or general taxation) to compensate.

Right, so then those top consumers turn right around and add that tax as part of the pricing for their products, which the poor then have to pay anyway.... Brilliant!

I'm a fairly right-wing (at least by EU standards) investment banker "greenie" and I have no desire to mess up anybody else's life, including those further down the line when we've burnt way more fossil fuels than was in any way necessary and (a) certainly squandered the cheap stuff and (b) possibly ruined the climate.

How we start telling women they can't just pump out as many kids as they can to maximize entitlement payouts? The problem is that the world is heading towards overpopulation, and no amount of taxation is going to fuel that demand.

Re:thorium OR ???

[TrumpetPower!]

No, renewables can't meet the demand today, and possibly never will. You have made the classic mistake of assuming your experience is typical of everything everywhere. A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time.

Purest bullshit.

I have not quite half my roof covered in solar panels, and I generate 150% as much electricity as I use -- enough to power an electric vehicle that I plan on buying in the next couple years or so.

Granted, I live in Arizona. But if you were to teleport my house to Seattle, I'd only need to cover the rest of the roof to make up the deficit -- and probably not even quite that much.

As for overnight? First, we've got far more than adequate baseload generating capacity to last us for a loooong time. But, more to the point, a Tesla-sized battery would be plenty to keep me going overnight -- and that's an expensive battery designed for a high-performance vehicle; something much more pedestrian would be just fine. Or, much more preferably, the utilities can continue to remain relevant by investing in utility-scale storage, such as pumped hydro or running fuel cells in reverse or even generating hydrocarbon fuels from atmospheric CO2 via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

We've already got the infrastructure in place for solar: our rooftops and the existing grid. And we've got the technology; labor and code compliance are the most expensive parts of any solar installation today. And we would have had the money...the $1.5 trillion we've burned blowing up brown people in the past decade would have quite nicely paid for the solarification of America.

What we lack is the moral integrity and courage to tell the Koch Brothers what to shove up their asses, and how far.

Cheers,

b&

Re:Assumptions

[phantomfive]

I totally agree with you on this one. If you could get a 40MPG car for less than $20k, it would cut energy usage more than anything else, especially as time passed and they started showing up on the used market.

profits

[Smiddi]

At current trents.....bla, bla, bla. I think we all agree, that if we base it on current population growth and the current mindest of "just build more and bigger power stations" then the opitons are limited Whats overlooked in alomost every one of these "studies" funded by power companies is the decentralisation of power. Each household and business has the ability to conserve their power (insulation, efficent heating, etc), plus generate their own power (using solar, wind - where possible, regenative power). This model will remove the need for bigger and more power stations. The main issue with this model isnt changing peoples minds; its that under this decentralised model power companies would reduce or lose their profits. So the current model remains :(

Re:Assumptions

[phantomfive]

That's fine for dropping energy usage somewhat in the US and other developed countries, but the biggest cost coming up is the billions of people in India, China, and other developing countries who are scaling up their energy usage. These are people who never had air conditioning before, and are going to start wanting it. You'll need more than tariffs and subsidies for these people.

Re:Assumptions

[epyT-R]

Um yeah, because jobs are important? I wonder if you'd be shooting your mouth off with 'dey tek er jerbs' if it was your job on the line. I'm sorry if the average american doesn't want to drive a little unsafe, underpowered plastic shitbox to work that's loaded down with tons of heavy 'safety' equipment to compensate (poorly) for it. You can't be serious if you expect to drive one of those smart-karts on a highway...

I find other countries' anti-american propaganda amusing because, while it dumps on american 'exceptionalism' and 'imperialism', the 'solutions' provided boil down to "be more like us." Such fucking hypocrites. People who live in tiny, socialist 'paradise' countries have no business telling america how to handle its transportation needs. It reeks of ignorance and arrogance.

Who makes up this 'rest of the world', and who are you to claim to speak for it? More arrogance...

Re:Assumptions

[epyT-R]

Fine.. Transition first, THEN tax the old way into oblivion, and when it's gone, I don't want to hear any officials saying, "omg we need to find a new source of income for to replace what was supposed to be temporary." When the fossil tax has ended its usefulness, end the tax and return the money to the people who paid into it. Bonus points if they do a little conservative investing to grow the size of the pool before giving it back.

In any case, the transition technology better work well BEFORE this is done. What usually happens here is the state gleefully leaps at the opportunity to tax something new and puts the buggy before the horse, making misery for everyone. Often in these cases, they bump the taxes again and the new tech never materializes, or when it does, it's hardly ready for consumption, or ends up being worse for the environment than the fossil fuel. Of course, this is if the greedy bastards don't decide to defund the new tech completely and then use the new 'revenue' for some other bullshit. Even if the tech should've been defunded, you'll never see these bureaucrats give a tax refund to the people who paid into it. Of course not.

America has a runaway deficit spending problem..like a 16yo entitlement princess blowing away her father's credit card on stupid shit while her mother has his balls in a vice. I already pay 40% of my income in tax in some or other. Enough. I will not pay more just for the 'privilege' of getting to work.

Re:Assumptions

[Jmc23]

Spoken like a true USian, always believing everybody else is as greedy, selfish, and corrupt as themselves.

free market & socialism can coexist

[globaljustin]

yeah, man, I agree...

I was impressed with the NFL's revenue sharing (compared to other pro leagues) and also the level of "parity" among the teams is noticably higher than other pro sports!

I don't disagree with anything you say...you're right on...it doesn't disprove my point...i'm talking about on-field competition...fans, players, coaches, etc demand pure fair competition and we pull it off well

to the deeper point, you're hitting on the fact that the 'free market' and 'socialism' are not mutually exclusive...i'm a left-leaning libertarian...so that's kind of where I'm coming from

Americans know fair competition...

Re:Assumptions

[kimvette]

> If you don't want to hurt people, you will be concerned about the long term effects of climate change and the effects of nuclear meltdowns. [...] Ask the people in Fukushima.

Climate change causes earthquakes now?!

Wow, I learn something new on /. every day.

Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Assumptions

[FlyHelicopters]

The problem with the idea of cutting your energy consumption in half is that it actually doesn't matter. As long as your energy comes from carbon sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas, it makes no difference.

.

We can burn it all in 50 years, 250 years, or 500 years, it makes no difference, burn it all we will, releasing 100 million years of carbon in a very short period of time. From Earth's point of view, there is no difference between 50 years and 500 years, the climate doesn't work on that small of a time scale.

The only solution is to stop burning it outright, leave it in the ground where it belongs.

The only way to do that is with nuclear, there is no where near enough solar, wind, and water energy on Earth to power everything that we do, it just isn't even close.

Re:Assumptions

[FlyHelicopters]

Yes, it is, assuming that Exxon doesn't change behavior when you start trying to take their money. The problem is, they will change... to avoid giving it to you.

.

And it still won't matter, because they are still burning fossil fuels, which needs to stop, or it makes no difference what any of us does.

Or do you think we can release 100 million years worth of carbon in just a few hundred years and do no damage?

Re:Assumptions

[RespekMyAthorati]

Damn straight.

If I want to let my septic system spill out into my neighbour's well, that's his problem.
Nobody is going to force me to be a good neighbour. And anybody who tries is "immoral and despicable" and "whether they admit it or not are anti-freedom".

So nyah.

Re:Assumptions

[ultranova]

You assume that there is a "market" that decides that the "cheapest energy" will win in the long run.

There is no electric market in the US? Or do the people simply prefer nuclear over wind there, to the point of actually being willing to pay more (and wait 15 years)?

First of all there is no market.

Well then, maybe you should fix that first? Separate the wires and power generation and mandate "wire neutrality" or something?

Everything right now was casked in concrete over the previous 50 or more years mainly by government interests.

Please explain - is the building of wind farms not permitted? Do black helicopters block the sunlight? What?

A new build nuclear plant, if we start today with the planning, will be ready in 15 years, at the soonest, if no court or other interference kills it mid term. That means we have a delay of 15 years to scale up in energy production by 4 - 6 GW. Or a similar delay in replacing a similar amount of coal power.
Wind and solar on the other hand makes it easy to connect power generation in small chunks to the grid continiously.
I can plan for a 4GW wind farm and comnect it while I build it in 100MW chunks to the grid. So instead of waiting 15 years for a new nuclear plant TO HAVE ANY EFFECT I have an imediate effect if I build wind and solar plants.
And obviously: a new build wind/solar plant generates energy cheaper than a new build nuclear plant.

And this gets back to my original question: why are the plural you not building wind and solar, then? Surely their cheap power would make the nuke-builders cut their losses long before the 15 years are up, thus making it unnecessary to argue against nuclear power on Slashdot.

Re:Assumptions

[riverat1]

Solar energy is a nearly ideal source for air conditioning power since generally when you need it the worst the Sun is shining brightly.

Re: Assumptions

[budgenator]

The French reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods, which greatly reduces the waste storage requirements; even without reprocessing after 300 years it's back to low level hazard and pretty much ready to be reused as high quality nuclear fuel

Re:Assumptions

[rtb61]

Implement luxury taxes, where wasteful uses of energy are taxed at far higher rates. Jewellery, cosmetics, luxury estates, large recreational vessels etc. Being rich is not a licence to consumer and pollute at insane levels just so you can be a poseur amongst the countless less fortunate. At least the would force the rich and greedy to switch to less wasteful less pollution generating products, often regardless of cost, due to their myopic paranoia when it comes to paying taxes.

Amazing

[WindBourne]

So many are so short sighted. The far right will only invest into nat. gas or large uranium based companies such as GE and WestingHouse. The far left wants nothing by 'renewable'. Yet, the reason why America, along with the world, is because we invest far too much into ONE solution. For example, back in 79, hydro provided about 1/3 of our electricity, nuke about 1/3, and fossil fuel about 1/3. From that point on, between the far right pushing fossil fuel and the far left fighting hydro and nukes, by 2005, we switched to 75% fossil fuel, of which 60% was coal. Now, Coal is around 35% and dropping, BUT, nat gas is climbing (better, but not great). However, renewable is NOT growing fast enough and more importantly, it can not.

Out best solution is to move the coal=>methane, with the generated CO2 being disposed of properly, nat gas, renewable esp. wind, and geo-thermal, and NEW nukes being our core ENERGY solution.
And oddly, the new thorium nukes would not only be safer, but would burn ONLY fuel that is ABOVE ground. America is loaded with thorium that was mined long ago. As such, these new nukes could provide 100% of our power for over 100 years, without mining a single item. And yet, we have intelligent ppl even here on /. that will oppose this.
Sad.

Re:Assumptions

[riverat1]

Small, local wind or solar power plants may be individually unreliable but many of them spread out over large areas are far less so. Solar cells still produce power when it's cloudy, just not as much as in full sunlight.

Re:There so called reneuables are WORST ...

[BlueTemplar]

You know that there are lots of other renewables out there, and that some people actually don't consider these biofuels as renewables?

Re:Assumptions

[riverat1]

Iceland is by far the most profligate with electricity so much that I had to leave them off the graph below to avoid too much skewing.

Iceland has so much geothermal and hydro power they have electricity to burn and no place to use it but locally. Most of the resource has not been developed because there's no place to use it.* It's not reasonable to compare them to any other place. The closest might be New Zealand.

*They're in talks with the United Kingdom about building a high voltage DC link to transmit excess power there which would cause more development.

Re:thorium OR ???

[interkin3tic]

A bit off topic, but telling people they're part of the problem is counterproductive. You're not going to convince anyone they're wrong by slapping them in the face like that. Moreover, the problem is absolutely not people who are anti-nuclear or pro-renewables. The problem is caused by a number of greedy individuals who get rich off of externalized costs, and a lot of apathetic individuals.

If the earth were all populated with people concerned as pla, we would be in other messes I'm sure (no offense pla but I'm sure you're not perfect) but we would NOT be facing the fallout of climate change. We'd have invested heavily in renewable energies, if they were viable we'd be using them. Instead we're populated with people who prefer to say "Well, that's just like a HYPOTHESIS so I'm not going to change or pay more."

Re:Assumptions

[Uberbah]

Well, they are (construction I think is about 70% of the cost, but I forget at the moment... I work on a different energy source), but feel free to make shit up, again.

I find your lack of self-awareness of shit-making disturbing, given your assertions:citations ratio.

Here, go read something about the actual costs.

You mean nuclear industry PR? Do you also cite Halliburton on the safety of fracking?

Well it's quite a bit warmer than Russia, where a good friend works has worked as a nuclear engineer for a decade....

You could try not making shit up for a few minutes and ask your Russian friend about the value of insulation before you dismiss it out of hand.

Re: Assumptions

[Uberbah]

Reduces but does not eliminate the problem:

Old nuclear fuel assemblies -- highly radioactive, elongated packages of metal rods that once energized some of France's 58 nuclear power plants -- are gripped by large mechanical arms. They are hoisted by cranes and placed on belts that move them along in the dim orange light. The machinery works to prepare the assemblies to be lowered into four giant pools.

There they will sit, with about 13 feet of demineralized water above them, a bath to shield and cool them, for about three years. Then more machines will lift them out, chop them up and put the pieces to be dissolved in vats of nitric acid. The fissioning of the fuel in the power plant, or the splitting of uranium atoms to release energy, has created a large family of elements, called fission products. The goal of this process is to find and recycle the ones that still contain more energy -- the plutonium and the uranium.

Spent fuel rods also contain elements that have relatively little energy, but plenty of long-lasting radiation. These include americium, curium, cesium and iodine. They are sent off to be immobilized -- hopefully for thousands of years -- by imbedding them in glass logs. Employees here monitor and operate their robotic helpers from a bank of computers housed in lime-green metal coverings.

Re:Assumptions

[Miamicanes]

> Solar energy is a nearly ideal source for air conditioning power since generally when you need it the worst the Sun is shining brightly.

Except for the fact that you'd need about an acre of PV cells to generate enough electricity to air condition a single-family home, let alone a multistory office building.

There are more efficient ways to use solar energy for air conditioning (like geothermal, using the sun's heat to superheat and compress the refrigerant gas), but it only works WELL in places that only get really hot for a few weeks per year, like Michigan, Canada, and Scandinavia. In places like Florida, Dubai, and India, the ground has absorbed so much heat over the millennia (because the temperatures don't really vary much over the course of the year), a semi-passive geothermal air conditioning system would only be able to drop the indoor air temperature a few degrees below ambient outdoor air temperatures, and would do a shit job of wringing humidity out of the air because it has too much latent heat for a geothermal system to deal with. To chill a 90-degree room down to 75 degrees and reduce the humidity, you can't pump 75-degree air into the room... you have to pump ~40-50 degree air into the room. If you had perfect insulation and kept up the 75-degree air, you'd eventually end up with an interior that approached 75 degrees, but had air saturated with almost 100% relative humidity. To really wring the moisture out of the air, it has to be supercooled relative to your desired target temperature.

Re:Assumptions

[Miamicanes]

What are you talking about? Honda or Toyota (I forget which) is ALREADY the largest automaker in America, and VW would be on the list as well if they weren't able to make cars in Mexico and Brazil instead. Japanese carmakers now export about as many finished cars to Japan from the US as they import into the US. For all intents and purposes, it now costs as much to make a car in Japan as it does to make one in the US, so it's more cost-effective for companies like Honda to make some models in Japan, some models in the US, and run the cargo ships full in both directions.

There's no grand conspiracy to keep fuel-efficient European microcars off the road. If you want to buy a Smart Car or a Mini Cooper, most big cities (on the east and west coast, at least... not sure about the middle part of the country) have at least one dealer. There just isn't much of a market for them, because nobody who isn't a wealthy trend-conscious Green is going to go out and spend $25k+ for a car that's basically a glorified 2-seater Geo Metro with leather seats.

You can just smell it

[Quila]

The authoritarianism is quite thick on this topic.

Re:Assumptions

[Miamicanes]

The energy use of CRTs is exaggerated. If you compare the power consumption of a 32" CRT from around 1997 to the power consumption of a second-generation 32" LCD from around 2004, they were almost dead even, and both were substantially less than the power used by plasma and projection TVs.

NEW LCDs do use less power, but it's not really fair to compare a 15 year old CRT to a brand new LCD, because for LCDs, low power consumption is a recent phenomenon that was absolutely NOT the norm before governments started to make a big deal about it.

Most of the energy savings from NEW LCD TVs comes from the use of high-efficiency switchmode power supplies instead of low-efficiency (but cheap) linear power supplies, and vastly more energy-efficient energy usage when "off". If you retrofitted the same improvements onto a CRT, it wouldn't do as well as a LCD of comparable brightness, size, and resolution... but it wouldn't be the night/day difference people seem to think it would be.

In theory, a CRT could almost be MORE efficient than a LCD TV. Stop and think for a moment how superbright LED-illuminated LCD TVs are illuminated. You have fairly hot LEDs emitting ultraviolet light that causes a phosphor coating to fluoresce white, then shield that light through colored filters controlled by solid-state venetian blinds. Compare that to the elegant simplicity of using a high-voltage, but low-power, electron beam to illuminate phosphors directly. You can't quite compare the two technologies directly, but LCD (and LED) are not the holy nirvana they're made out to be, especially when amped up to the same brightness levels as an old CRT TV.

Re:Assumptions

[FlyHelicopters]

France gets 80% of its power from nuclear, so your "over 50%" number doesn't really ring true.

Re:Assumptions

[Miamicanes]

> Because responding to massive fires across entire regions is cheap, responding to cat 4 and 5 hurricanes is cheap,

Today's forest fires aren't really any bigger or worse than the forest fires we had 200 years ago. The ONLY difference is that 200 years ago, the forest fires burned vast areas where nobody lived, but those same forests NOW have tens of thousands of multi-million dollar estate homes sitting on wooded lots 50 miles+ out into suburbia, and occasionally a really bad fire makes its way into a more middle-class neighborhood that backs up against an area that hasn't been developed yet.

Ditto for hurricanes. The hurricanes making landfall in the US aren't really any worse than the ones that hit a century ago.The difference is, a hundred years ago, Florida had less than a million people, most of whom lived north of Orlando. In 1899, the City of Miami's founders had to semi-fraudulently recruit soldiers stationed at Fort Dallas to get a quorum of 100 people and qualify for incorporation as a city. Today, there are VERY few places along Florida's coast where a hurricane could make landfall without directly affecting at least a million people. A picture is worth a thousand words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:South_Florida_from_space_NASA.jpg

Re:thorium OR ???

[FlyHelicopters]

There is a small flaw in your numbers... You say that a sub-$10K solar installation can power a house, that is not true. I've looked into it, if I could spend $10K and power even 1/3 of my house, I'd do it in 5 seconds. In truth, it would take $60K worth of solar to power 1/3 of my house's annual electrical needs, that is just not reasonable, even with the tax credits and rebates that are out there. My out of pocket cost on that install was $37K, and to cut my power bill by 1/3 for $37K out of pocket makes no sense.

Re:thorium OR ???

[FlyHelicopters]

Turning out the lights at night isn't going to save us, the problem is larger than that. Even if we cut energy use in half in America and Europe, we'll be overwhelmed by the billions of people who currently use very little power who are going to start using a lot more. The population also continues to grow, in 50 years it may well double again, so we'd be back to the same point. We need the ability to generate huge amounts of power cleanly and cheaply, not to turn off some lights and call it fixed.

Re:thorium OR ???

[FlyHelicopters]

So true... Also, has anyone considered what the environmental effects of covering millions of square miles of our planet with solar panels is? They complain about the effects of a single pipeline, yet they could care less about any possible effects of millions, if not billions of solar panels.

Re:thorium OR ???

[FlyHelicopters]

You must not have AC, if only half of your roof is covered in solar and it makes more power than you need.

.

I priced solar about 2 years ago, had my roof measured and power needs compared to what could be provided. My entire roof (I live in Texas) can provide about 1/3 of my house's power needs, at an out of pocket cost after tax credits of $37K.

That is a bad deal which is why solar isn't on my house, or any other house around here. If solar made so much sense, we'd all install it.

Re:Assumptions

[burning-toast]

Personally, I agree with you on eliminating tax breaks for big-oil. However, I hate the concept of charge-em-now and subsidize it back later.

First, that assumes those constituents can float the charge now. Many poor people's budgets cannot afford to loan the government money until tax returns are processed.

Second, It sets them up for being called "dependent" on the government subsidies, leeches, whatever. It's not honest to "fake" charge people for services you intend to later subsidize anyways. That is just an accounting trick and it makes people targets of political fights. It is far more honest to build-in your cost targets to the up front price rather than attempt to leave "retail" alone and later "subsidize". Far less loophole wrangling that way too.

In all, I probably agree with your idea for the most part, but subsidies is not the way to go IMHO.

- Toast

Re:Assumptions

[mcvos]

The basic problem with conservation and demand being reduced by increased cost, is that THE USA will go to war over energy concerns.

There, fixed that for you.

Nice try, but the only real difference between the USA and any other nation in this regard is $1 Trillion USD in defense spending...

And that's a very big difference. It means the USA can go to war over energy concerns.

Re:thorium OR ???

[mcvos]

You make a lot of unfounded claims, but you're wrong. Just solar alone can easily power the world many times over if we want to. The problem is that the political will is lacking. And solar isn't even the most abundant power source. Geothermal has many times that capacity.

The only thing we need is an efficient way to even out the difference between fluctuation demand and fluctuating supply. Nuclear can't do that; it produces a steady output, which is great for a baseline load, but not suitable for meeting the fluctuations in demand. At the moment, that's done by gas turbines. I'm not sure how suitable geothermal or hydro would be for that.

Re:Assumptions

[maxwell demon]

OK, so I may have been wrong in how the energy saving is achieved, but then, the situation as you described it is even more in line with my actual point. While someone might still cite advantages of CRTs (like viewing angle independence), a more efficient power supply certainly does not make your TV or computer monitor less comfortable or less usable in any way at all.

Re:Assumptions

[jareth-0205]

So your solution is to go back to the dark ages? And fuck all the countries that haven't developed yet? Your genius knows no bounds.

Re:Assumptions

[DamonHD]

I more than cover my entire primary energy consumption (heat+light) now with solar PV, so it does make a difference.

We should indeed leave as much as possible of the remaining ffs in the ground.

And there is plenty of renewable energy available, but up in the UK we'd have to tolerate some industrialisation of the landscape and we currently have a timing issue in the absence of sufficient storage.

I'm not against nukes at all; a close relative was the lead lawyer that got the last large UK reactor built, on the planning/enquiry side.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Assumptions

[BlackPignouf]

I wish I had mod points.
Renewables are *by definition* enough.
It's what's left after we burnt (or decided to stop burning) everything else.
So yes, we'll surely have to use less AC, forget airplanes, drive smaller cars, eat less meat and buy less useless gadgets, but renewables will someday be enough with 100% certainty.

Re:Assumptions

[BlackPignouf]

You, sir, are an idiot.
What do you think will happen to poor people when there's no oil left?
Do you really think gas will never get more expensive, independently from green taxes?

Re:Assumptions

[TheRaven64]

I don't think it's overstated. The building I work in was designed in the late '90s, on the assumption that everyone would have a 17-19" CRT on their desk. Over the next decade, everyone switched to LCDs. Now everyone has a 24-30" TFT on their desk, and the heating system is struggling because the amount of waste heat from the displays is far less than the building was designed for.

Oh, and I think you're somewhat overestimating the efficiency of electron guns in your description of CRTs. If you could just stick a current across the phosphor and make it glow, that would be great, but the energy loss from heating up a cathode, sticking it near a magnet, and letting the electrons dump energy into the phosphor is huge.

Re:thorium == wealth creation via cheaper energy

[TheRaven64]

Having the $10K isn't necessarily required for the person wanting to use the solar array. There are companies here that will install a solar array for free and give you the power you use for free and make money based on feeding the power you don't use back into the grid. Unfortunately, they're only viable because of the (quite large) government subsidies. About a fifth of the money they make comes from the electricity company paying for the power and the rest from the government paying them to produce it. Solar panels have been improving hugely over the last decade, but they still need a factor of four or five improvement in cost per Watt to be economically feasible for most people (and good luck keeping the price down as demand spikes), which is likely quite a few years away.

Wind is often a lot more feasible. A relatively small wind generator can give you 1-3kW for about a tenth of the price of the solar array. The problem is that the supply is even less reliable than the solar panels. An electricity grid needs either some big stable supplies or a lot of diversity and overprovisioning to be able to keep up with demand spikes.

Most energy use is for 3 things

[msobkow]

Most of our energy use is for 3 things:

• Heating
• Cooling
• Transportation

If we're ever to have a hope of being able to rely on renewables (with or without nuclear add-ons), we have got to start building more energy efficient homes and businesses, and shift to an older style of transportation relying on long-haul trains to distribution centers, and pull trucking back to local short-hauls.

More importantly, we have got to address the huge amounts of energy that go into commuting from the urban sprawl to and from work. I realize that Canadians and Americans are in love with their cars, but that really has got to change for predictable routes like getting to and from work. It is absolutely insane to not only drive one (or even a few) people per vehicle downtown, when so many people are headed to the same place from the same suburbs.

Re:thorium OR ???

[TheRaven64]

I'd actually be happy with a quite small array of batteries that would power a DC main in my house for LED lighting and charging electronic devices. The big energy consuming appliances (fridge, washing machine, and so on) could stay on AC, but I'd love to have a separate DC main for all of the things that want to consume DV, and avoid generating DC, converting it to AC to transmit it a few tens of metres, and then converting it back into DC inefficiently at the socket.

This is getting ridiculous

[Time_Ngler]

Why is everyone so concerned about climate change now? What about eons ago when life formed? Talk about a radical change to earth's climate, it absolutely got smothered in life and its byproducts everywhere. Yet, no one even mentions that anymore. We should work on cleaning up the effect to the climate due to life *first*, then we can talk about this comparatively small after-effect from technology after that.

Imagine a rocky planet, with just clean water, minerals, rock, sand, dust. If we work together we can make it happen!

Re:This is getting ridiculous

[BlueTemplar]

Some food for thought :
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-03/does-the-earth-need-saving

What about putting nuclear deep in the ground?

[master_p]

What if we put nuclear power stations deep in the ground so as that any nuclear accident can be simply dealth with by burying the stations with the dirt and rock above them?

Re:Assumptions

[TheLink]

And that's a pretty big difference.

The scenario where someone says, "Gimme your stuff or I'll take it by force", and you reply "You and whose army?" plays out rather differently when there's a trillion dollar army...

Re:Assumptions

[Joce640k]

Yep. You have laws against polluting rivers, anti-smog laws, you even have laws against dropping bits of paper in the street.

Nobody seems to be making noise about how those laws they're taking away their personal freedoms.

Guess what? CO2 is a pollutant. There's no reason not to regulate how much of it people are allowed to release into the air.

Re:Assumptions

[magic maverick]

FYI: The USSR was the very definition of 2nd world. The more you know.

Re:Assumptions

[jez9999]

Nuclear power isn't reliable? Where do you get that idea, with modern nuke plants?

Wrong way for climate

[mdsolar]

The authors seem to have misunderstood the situation. Nuclear power slows response to climate change owing to opportunity cost. You get much more reduction in emissions by excluding nuclear power than by including it. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly

The comparison is not with fossil fuels. "Quantitative analyses show that the risks associated with the expanded use of nuclear energy are orders of magnitude smaller than the risks associated with fossil fuels." The comparison is with other alternatives to fossil fuels.

Further, on their scaling argument, there are huge bottlenecks to scaling nuclear power. There are insufficient large casting facilities, the designs they prefer are unready for deployment and uranium resources are inadequate for a large scale deployment. Tripling the use of nuclear power means building power plants that run out of fuel before the end of their design lifetime.

The lowest cost and most scalable approach is large scale renewables with supportive transmission. A quantitative analysis that looks at the appropriate elements can be found in the book "Reinventing Fire" by Amory Lovins.

Finally, it should be clear that not putting all ones eggs in one basket should not preclude us from avoiding baskets that drop in a particularly messy way. The Fukushima-Chernobyl basket defeats climate action because of the mess.

Re:Assumptions

[rally2xs]

The house is insulated. Who _doesn't_ have their own washing machine? Open the windows and suffer from the hay fever as the pollen comes whistling in on the wind. There are NOT 100's of ways to reduce usage without suffering from "too hot" or "too cold" or a bunch of other things that we all moved out of caves and tents to avoid.

It's Too Late

[benjamindees]

It's too late. It was a political decision, and one that that had to be made well in advance. The decision was made a long time ago. Plans were put in place that can't be undone. Industries were bailed-out that shouldn't have been bailed-out. Things were blown up that can't be un-blown-up. Recession and renewables were chosen over nuclear. There is an agenda. Renewables fit it. Nuclear doesn't. The choice was made to push ahead with wind and photovoltaics for those who can afford it, hoping it can scale up quickly enough, leaving the masses in squalor for the time being. Perhaps longer. It's going to be incredibly disruptive, in the US especially. But there's not much that can be done at this point. Nuclear is no longer an option. The only remaining option is the choice between putting the rest of the carbon in the air, risking the environment, or stunting the economy for a period of some decades. I imagine it will come down to a compromise, some mixture of the two that leads to the same death toll either way. There is a popular delusion that subsidized healthcare can mitigate this. But it's pretty much a zero-sum game. Only hard choices remain.

Re:Assumptions

[rally2xs]

Well, if we didn't have to defend the entire rest of the world from all the bad guys, we wouldn't have to spend big $$$ for defense. And, we're about to stop that, so the next time your neighbor comes rolling across your border with tanks, think about defending your own damn selves rather than calling the USA to come do it for you. A week or 2 ago the Saudis broke diplomatic relations with the US because _we_ didn't go in and do something about Syria. F them! They want something done, they should get some of their own damn troops together and go do it themselves. They've got all our money from the oil sales anyway, so they can afford it.

Re:thorium OR ???

[pla]

How many solar panels would be required to 'pave over death valley'?

For large-scale installations, we have better, simpler, old-school tech than installing actual solar panels. My point more addressed the will, not the specifics.

TFA claims that we can't meet the world's power needs with renewables. I call BS, we just don't have the will to move off of the sweet, sweet teat of oil, for which we already have massive infrastructure in place to support its use. Do you have any idea how many gas stations the US has? How many miles of oil and natural gas pipelines exist? How much effort and expense goes into maintaining those?

To directly answer your question, though, it would take almost exactly six billion panels to literally pave Death Valley. We wouldn't actually need that many, however, since the entire annual US electric budget only comes in at 4,138TWh - Which a mere 5.2B (cheap consumer-grade) panels would satisfy. But as I mentioned above, we wouldn't really use 5.2 cheap consumer-grade billion panels - We'd use either an array of more traditional solar thermal plants (aka lots of cheap mirrors heat something up), or at the very least, use newer, more efficient and multi-sun panels with their own array of mirrors. Current cells exist that can take 70k suns - Lowering the number of actual panels needed (as opposed to cheap mirrors) to a manageable 74 thousand.

Re:thorium == our only hope, obi wan

[TheRealHocusLocus]

An electricity grid needs either some big stable supplies or a lot of diversity and over provisioning to be able to keep up with demand spikes

The US was on a steady path leading to a nuclear grid until 1977, when Carter declared a moratorium on spent fuel processing. This caused more concern than alarm in the nuclear power industry, whose plants all had pools for temporary storage. Everyone thought it would be ironed out shortly, the government would step in to manage a secure facility to recycle plutonium and store long term waste. Then the China Syndrome [movie,1979], Three Mile Island [incident,1979] occured 12 days apart and everything came to a halt.

The only notable grid building that has occurred since then haas been the steady accumulation of coal-fired power plants over the years, a slight increase in nuclear, and only recently a shift to natural gas. That's it. There's your electrical grid.

Everything else has been incorrect projections and wasted money. Discussion of coal and natural gas power generation a topic? Nope, actually there has been twenty years of hype on solarand
wind, alternatives that are regiional at best, and upon any climate disruption that would generate cloud cover or disrupt wind patterns (no matter what the storage technology) would be a slate-wiper. Solar and Wind have presumed the building of branch feeders, there never was money for that. T. Boone Pickens lost his shirt on wind or let us say, provided a cautionary tale for other billionaires.

Solar subsidies will not just dry up... they will disappear overnight as the true crisis begins. Be it economic implosion or reigning in of government spending, the correction will be huge and sudden.

So now we are riding the crest of a natural gas glut which may last 30 years. I am hesitant to drop the 'hundreds' of years figure because it would be achieved with escalating difficulty and they wish to mass export it out of the country today. After that things looks pretty bleak. More coal??

That is why folks like me seem kind of desperately agitated on these forums at times. We're not adverse to personal self-sufficiency or conservation, we just see a terrible crisis ahead.

Part of the reason for the agitation in these discussions is that we are being presented with a steady stream well-meant suggestions for personally navigating the crisis, as if a little money ahead and a bit of ingenuity can mitigate the risk. And we do sense risk and danger.

That is why when we discuss the state of the grid we tend to sweep wind and solar off the table. Too aggressively, sure -- it is an aspect of our sense of dread, NOT an insensitivity to the usefulness and and cleverness of those sources.

We feel pressed on the matter. We are thinking of a long harsh Winter, just ONE country-wide ice storm which is possible, a serious further economic downturn, and the prospect of going to war over oil (again) or the dollar losing its reserve strength (happening!). All of these things, along with a hypothetical ~30 year glut of natural gas means there is perhaps still time to save the grid (and our way of life) if we get serious about fission and LFTR now, urgently.

Otherwise we are heading for THIS: a true blackout American Blackout. Never mind the unlikely cyberattack scenario, I do not even believe a Carrington Even EMP would take out that many points at once... and their time frame is a little extreme, "Day 10" events might occur at Week 10...

Thorium LFTRs would not in themselves save us if our lo

Re:Assumptions

[Demonantis]

Nuclear power is cheap and reliable, by any sane metric. Solar and wind both stop working regularly depending on weather conditions. They have to be heavily subsidized to even break even. Here in Ontario most of the subsidization is nuclear power to bring down the average energy price. I will agree with you though. We should be focusing on reducing inefficiency more. The power plants we don't build are the most environmentally friendly.

Re:Assumptions

[AmiMoJo]

So many incorrect assumptions. Not all 7 billion people use the same amount of energy, for a start. Here's the real kicker though: the average Japanese or German household uses less than half as much energy as the average American, yet they are not freezing cold or walking around in the dark. In fact they have comparable or better lifestyles to most Americans.

Re:thorium OR ???

[TrumpetPower!]

I most emphatically do have a heat pump, and I generally keep the thermostat set at about 80 during the summer -- and I'm in the middle of the metropolitan Phoenix area.

Unless your roof is mostly shaded, I can only assume that your house has no insulation whatsoever, or very large single-pane windows in direct sun, or other variations on that theme, and that you chill the place to below 70. You're describing needing something on the order of a 50 KW PV installation to reach 100% offset, which is industrial-sized.

Your electricity bills have likely also at least flirted with the four-figure mark, so I wouldn't necessarily feel so much sympathy at reluctance to spend $37K up front to reduce those. However, you'd be a textbook case of somebody who could get far better bang for the buck in efficiency improvements than in generating capacity. Once you're no longer wasting more electricity than an entire Mediterranean village, you won't need anywhere near as large an array to meet your needs.

Cheers,

b&

Re:thorium OR ???

[Shortguy881]

I stopped at A superconducting cable from the Mojave to Manhattan. Apparently you sir have not heard of electrical resistance. Yes we can do it, but the loss of energy as a function of length means we'd lose power doing something so ridiculous. This isn't a limit of technology, this is a limit of physics and a clear indicator that nothing you say is worth reading.

Re:thorium OR ???

[BullInChina]

I can back up your calculations. Did mine in Ohio and came up with about the same results. Large out of pocket expense for about 1/3 of my usage. Then no guaranteed subsidy as they would be so called market priced in the future and may be phased out. Decided to let the greenies invest. Oh also while the panel prices have become cheaper, have you priced the mounting brackets lately? Extremely high prices for these at about half the price of the panels.

Re:thorium == our only hope, obi wan

[BlueTemplar]

Where do you get that 30 years figure? If you consider reasonable assumptions, and not industry hype, it's rather around 4 years :
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-10-09/snake-oil-chapter-3-a-treadmill-to-hell

Re:thorium OR ???

[FlyHelicopters]

My average monthly utility bill is $300. Higher in the summer, lower in the winter. My house has R-44 attic insulation and double-pane windows, it is 12 years old so while it isn't the "latest" energy efficiency, it isn't 30 years old either. We cool to 74 degrees in the summer, and our roof is completely shade free (our trees haven't grown that much yet).

Re:thorium OR ???

[geoskd]

A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world tells you that god exists, and you are going to tell the rest of us that they are wrong because of your own anecdotal experience?

Sorry, I just had to. :)

I made no such claim, nor will I, as I am not experienced enough to make any such claim. I have my suspicions, but they are as purely anecdotal as the OPs claims.

Re:thorium OR ???

[geoskd]

A bit off topic, but telling people they're part of the problem is counterproductive. You're not going to convince anyone they're wrong by slapping them in the face like that.

Quite true, but I had no intention, nor hope, of changing his mind. He made it up long ago. It was the moderators who were modding up his half baked (and in part, outright fraudulent) claims that I wished to reach. They were the truly intended audience. I was deliberately inflammatory to get attention and responses which ensure that many more people will read the exchange. The people I wanted to reach will see the many viewpoints and make up their own minds. If his ego took a beating, then so be it, he'll live.

Re:Assumptions

[FlyHelicopters]

It is great that you cover your own needs with solar PV, if it made economic sense, I'd do the same.

But that doesn't matter, the UK, the US, and all of Europe could do it and it wouldn't matter. If India and China continue to burn fossil fuels and burn them all up over 500 years, the same damage is done.

This is a human species problem and a planet Earth problem, we have to stop doing it everywhere, or it isn't going to matter what a few of us do.

Don't misunderstand, I'm no Greenie, I understand that we pollute and that humans are messy creatures. Some amount is acceptable, but the amount we're doing is clearly not. The problem is that you simply can't release 100 million years of stored anything in 500 years and expect there to be no effect. There is no historical precedent because it has never been done before, but once we do it there is no going back. We also have no where else to live, so perhaps we should care a bit more about Earth before we really muck it up.

Re:Assumptions

[DamonHD]

We may be furiously agreeing.

At least compared to those that don't even see that we are taking risks or that it matters in any way to do so.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Assumptions

[FlyHelicopters]

Yea, that is probably true. :) I consider myself a conservative, but I am not one of those "head in the sand" types who thinks that the free market will fix everything. The problem is the free market takes no responsibility for the future effects of pollution or burning all that carbon. I just know that the idea of NIMBY is now out of date, we humans currently seem to think that if it isn't happening here, it must not be our problem. But we all live on the same planet, so just because our batteries are made in China doesn't mean we can ignore the pollution from their production. Or the pollution from their coal power plants that lack the controls US plants have, since we all breath the same air.

Re:Assumptions

[NoImNotNineVolt]

But I just love how the greenies want to fuck everybody with price hikes because THEY can afford them while ignoring that even a 40c a gallon gas hike raises the cost of food enough that more Americans will be going hungry.

So you're saying we can stop global warming and fix the obesity epidemic all at once?!?

Re:Assumptions

[Miamicanes]

You're right, I was just making the point that CRTs don't necessarily *have* to be the horrific energy hogs everyone makes them out to be. They were, because that's how everything back then was designed to be, and they were obsolete before most of the things that NOW make LCD displays energy-efficient were the norm.

Much of the alleged energy efficiency of LEDs comes from the fact that manufacturers are somehow able to pass off LEDs that are visibly inferior (when viewed side by side) as the "equivalent" of conventional technologies. A dim laptop screen is going to be more energy-efficient than any CRT is ever likely to be. A retina-searing OLED or superbright LCD that's measurably putting out as much brightness as a bright CRT or plasma TV will ultimately use almost as much power, and throw off almost as much total heat, as the genuinely-equivalent CRT or plasma TV will.

Illustrative exampe: LED Christmas lights, at least 60-70% of which aren't even half the brightness of the incandescent lights they're alleged to replace.

Electric farm machinery; organic fertilizers

[tepples]

If oil prices rise and remain high [...] near-universal poverty would reign across the land.

Poverty might increase where there's no wind and little sun, I'll grant.

We need [fossil fuel] to work the fields [...] transport it

Or electric power from wind, PV, or solar thermal.

produce the fertilizer

Thinking petroleum is the only way to make fertilizer is both bullshit and batshit. Literally.

produce the pesticides

There are alternatives as strong as chemicals.

so we can eat it instead of the bugs

Or maybe we could eat the bugs too. There's a reason food is called "grub": insects have protein.

Re:Electric farm machinery; organic fertilizers

[rally2xs]

You're dreaming. There are no electric farm implements, we haven't invented the batteries for that. Want to run utility lines to the fields? Bread would be $35 / loaf, and for a 40 HP tractor you'd be looking at 440 3-phase which would probably electrocute more farmer's kids with access to it than he can produce in a lifetime. If we do invent the batteries for that, they will be found mostly in highway vehicles, which if you calculate out the power requirements to completely convert highway transport to battery operated vehicles (as I have, roughly), we'd have to build something like 1,300 of what is our currently largest nuclear power plant, located in Arizona. You up for that? You are NEVER going to get enough solar / wind to exist to power our needs, even if you can see wind turbines all the way to the horizon in every square inch of the country. Not gonna happen. And if someone tried, all the green obstructionists would holler about the birds that would be driven extinct and the power wires "just because" (since power wires are totally benign.)

Re:Electric farm machinery; organic fertilizers

[catprog]

you mean like these eletric tractors?

http://www.energymatters.com.au/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=3847

or if you want a commercial company.

http://www.electrictractor.com/

12 million 1MW wind turbines would be needed to power the US ((25,776 TWh / (365 days) / 1MW) * 4) (25% capacity factor)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Current_consumption

With the area of the US being 9,826,675 km . Your looking at 1.5 wind turbines/km^2

Solar ((25,776 TWh / (4 hours * 365)) / 250 watts) * 1640mm * 992mm = 114,888.928 km^2 or about 1% of the us area.

Your nuclear example

  3.3 gigawatts * 1300 * 365days = 37,580.4 terawatt hours

Re:Assumptions

[spitzak]

LED Christmas lights use vastly less power than incandescent. That should be pretty obvious: they allow you to chain 20 LED strings in a row, and the wires are obviously cheap and thin. That would never be safe with incandescent.

Re:Assumptions

[StenD]

Also, how many "new build" nuclear plants are actually already partially built, but had construction halted? My father recently worked on a couple which are being completed now, after being placed on hold by the TVA in 1988. One problem, though, is that the engineers who understand how the 1970s-era plants were designed are retiring, and newly-graduated engineers have trouble adjusting to the older designs. The plans need to be completed while the old and new engineers can work together to meld newer technology into the older designs.

Re:thorium OR ???

[Bengie]

I think you have a few zeros misplaced. You can get a 7.5MW windturbine for $17.56mil. That is 14GW for about $32.7bil. Even if they only had 10% average generation, that's only $327b, not $400tril.

Re: Assumptions

[gzuckier]

Hell, even loans to poor people to buy high efficiency light bulbs, to be paid back by a charge on the electric bill, which would still be lower than with incandescents; let alone similar arrangements for making efficiency improvements in other energy utilization like heating.
For a lot of people the upfront cost of energy efficiency is insurmountable and nobody is going to give them a regular loan on the collateral of the money they will save on their monthly bills, but if it is tied together like this so the money saved goes directly into paying off the loan that seems less risky.

has anybody mentioned this?

[gzuckier]

By the time any new nuclear power plants get online it will be halfpast too late? Ten years minimum for current designs, longer for better designs that require some R&D.

Re: Assumptions

[gzuckier]

Last time I looked (which wasn't that recently) Honda was the largest exporter of US made cars. Apparently, even if the average American doesn't want to drive in "underpowered plastic shitboxes loaded down with tons of safety equipment to make up for it", the rest of the world seems to prefer it.

Re: Assumptions

[gzuckier]

Basically, it's too much trouble to try and steer away from the wall until we actually hit it. And since we haven't killed ourselves running into a wall so far, we're certain that we won't in the future.

Re: Assumptions

[gzuckier]

And the Fit, at least, is a perfectly respectable automobile

Economics

[DarthVain]

This is where the two headed troll of economics and markets come to dance.

1) The best way to promote conservation is to make the user pay full (un-subsidized) cost of the product (energy), then they would use the most efficient amount according to the invisible hand of the market lovers.
2) Those same people will say if you don't keep subsidizing cheap energy, you will destroy the economy and collapse civilization as we know it.

Anyway I agree, and disagree with your assessment (sort of). Yes I agree that energy is too cheap, and it's most efficient use for conservation would totally help in this regard. However, getting rid of subsidized energy would TOTALLY destroy ALL renewable energy sources, as NONE of them (with the exception of Hydro, which is geographically limited) would be able to compete in a totally open market. I agree with the article that some sort of nuclear is the future. Nuclear will allow the development of renewable technology, sources, and infrastructure. Natural gas which is what is being beaten like a dead horse is just a stop gap measure. It will eventually become scarce and expensive itself, then what? Also, I don't know all that much about it, but from the noise some are making, things like fracking arn't so great for the environment either (i.e. it may burn clean, but its extraction may be much worse)...

Incorrect assessment - US vs China vs Canada

[WillAffleckUW]

In actual fact, this is not a correct assessment.

The US actually has fewer emissions than we did a few years ago. Most of this is due to - wait for it - improved MPG requirements for trucks and cars.

Additionally, 12 US States required from 10 to 20 percent of all new power generation be from renewable resources.

The major problems are, in order:

1. China. If anyone should use nuclear, it's China. They crank out 2 coal plants a day, and they don't have high efficiency coal plants or scrub their emissions. However, they are trying to also build renewable energy, and maybe we should help them do more of that.

2. Canada - only one province in Canada creates most of the GHG emissions. Alberta. Take down that rogue province and you'll see they could solve their climate change emissions just by doing what all the other Canadian provinces are doing. Sanction that. Bonus: Canada has cleaner more reliable nuclear fission plants than we do.

3. Rogue US states not requiring 10-20 percent renewable for new power generation facilities. Easiest way is end all tax subsidies and cheap oil, coal, and gas (yes, natural gas has HALF the emissions but that's a lot more than ZERO). and have a national 20 percent requirement, allowing states to have higher requirements.

It's not that hard. In fact, just removing the subsidies for oil, coal, and gas would mostly fix the problem in the US, and similar changes in China and Canada.

Analogy

[DarthVain]

I am not sure if this is an analogy for something, but it should be. Your range of possibilities reminded me of my first year living in a house with friends during university.

As some parents are wont to do in an attempt to off-set their children's university costs, a friend of mine parent's bought a house in city our university was in, for him to live in and to rent out the rest of it. He convinced us (4 guys) to live with him and pay rent. His parents who lived far away, basically made him our landlord. What could possibly go wrong? Anyway I am pretty sure he pocked whatever the differences in expenses were, so like any good manager he reduced the heat to Siberian like levels. Arguments would ensue when we inevitably increased the heat back to normal. Eventually in a fool proof plan, he duct taped the thermostat. While we could have just as easily have removed the tape and increased it anyway (which I think we did once or twice), and seeing the infantile method being employed, it was answered in kind, when the oven was simply turned on full blast and the door left open...

Re:thorium OR ???

[Jmc23]

No, we just need to understand harmony and self-sustaining systems.

Near the equator you can easily build a self-sustaining house that maintains itself at about 22c, produces Ice daily for a cold room, water purification, etc... all built by hand with materials found on site. A little bit harder further north, but I could feasibly build one in Canada for 100k, piece of cake with 200k, and that's mainly because I'd have to use things that were not designed for that purpose.

Seriously think about how stupid it is to place a bunch of bunch of machines that dump heat into a room and then use an air conditioner to remove the heat, and then when you need heat you turn on a heat machine! Total waste.

Tell me, how many transformers do you think the average household has? How many motors? How many machines to do physical labour for ourselves while we deprive our bodies of the necessary physical labour to maintain health? We live in a society of children and unfortunately the US is the main culprit for the spread of this immature, greedy, selfish, slothful lifestyle. Hopefully one day they will use their huge influence for something good instead of the destruction of nature.

Re:Assumptions

[HiThere]

Yes, but is $12 billion per incident a reasonable maximum? I'm pretty sure we haven't even had an accident close to that, so one could say yes, but given the nature of the beast we could well have an accident that exceeded it. And nobody (i.e., the individuals injured) would need to bear the difference in cost. If I'm understanding this correctly, when the cap is passed, so is all corporate liability.

you may be mistaken

[rewindustry]

source wiki:

At the present time, the price of the raw materials cadmium and tellurium are a negligible proportion of the cost of CdTe solar cells and other CdTe devices. However, tellurium is an extremely rare element (1–5 parts per billion in the Earth's crust; see Abundances of the elements (data page)), and if CdTe were to be used in sufficiently large quantities (for example, to make enough solar cells to provide a significant proportion of worldwide energy consumption), tellurium availability could be a serious problem. See Cadmium telluride photovoltaics for more information.

wiki does not have an entry directly relating to Copper indium gallium (di)selenide, as yet, so i can't quote for the common alternative.

and in regard to the alternative

[rewindustry]

i should have read further - again i quote wiki:

Despite CIGS having the advantage over CdTe, which is negatively affected by the issues of both heavy metal cadmium usage and rare-earth telluride availability, the development of the CIGS lags behind CdTe commercially.

Re:and in regard to the alternative

[DamonHD]

CIGS/CdTe is thin-film not monocrystalline (silicon): very different technology.

Rgds

Damon

Re:thorium OR ???

[FlyHelicopters]

That all sounds really nice, but out here in the real world it isn't going to help much.

I fully agree with you regarding the whole "computers make heat so run AC" argument, but unless you're willing to put all the servers where it is cold most of the time, you will continue to have that be an issue.

Beyond that, the problem remains bigger than you think. Nothing that you or I do addresses the big picture. Right now, 500 million people in India do not have running water in their house. That will change over the next 50 years. The amount of energy required to pump, clean, and process water for 500 million people should not be underestimated. For whatever low hanging fruit that you might find in the developed world, it will not counter the energy needs of the developing world.

So you need both. Yes, we should find ways to use less energy to do the same work, I'm all for replacing incandescent bulbs with CF or even LED bulbs, I'm all for more efficient AC units and better engines in our cars that get more MPG. But that is only half of the equation.

The other half is to produce more power cleanly, since energy demands are not going to go down any time soon, they will keep rising year after year, even with all those efforts. You simply can't install enough solar panels to keep up, you need large GW scale power plants and you need to build them at faster rate. Coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear, are about the only options for doing so.

Wind is fine, I have nothing against wind farms, but we can't base our power grid on them. Solar is a nice supplement to our power grid, I'm not against it either. But neither is going to do the job.

So, would you prefer we build 20 more coal fired power plants, or 20 more nuclear plants? It will be one or the other, so let me know which you prefer.

Re:Assumptions

[DarthVain]

In an ideal world, your argument would have some merit, if still incorrect. However we do not live in an ideal world. You talk about nuclear having road blocks, and a lot of time spend to build. Wind is easy you say! There are just as many, in fact more opposition to wind (I don't agree with it, but it is there). Project delays of 10+ years, that will never see the light of day. The foot print is much larger on wind. Also not all areas are suitable for wind, most of which are on or near water, which is prime real estate, and you now have a lot of money opposing your proposed project.

Now the three things you are wrong about is cost, time, and a basic understanding of the distribution of electricity.

Cost and time: One of the larger wind farms around these parts is a 86 turbine using newer larger 2.3MW producing 200MW. It took a long time to complete, and cost 400M dollars. The turbines had to be barged over from Europe. Deals had to be made with individual land owners. It will make money because of subsidy deal with government (which you pay with taxes anyway).

Typical nuclear station is over 1GW and includes 1-6 units. For this example say a 4GW facility. You would have to build 20 of those wind power stations to even match the capacity. That is over 1700 of those wind turbines. The cost would be about 8 Billion dollars.

Now you might say, OK, well that isn't too bad all things considered... However the estimated lifespan of a wind turbine is say 15-25 years as compared to 50-60 years for a nuclear plant.

However on top of that there is a fundamental difference between the two. Nuclear is always on, and always produces the same amount, 4GW in this example. Wind *might* produce that amount as a maximum ideally. Realistically the are times it produces pretty much nothing. This can really only be offset one way, which is the inefficient hydro storage, which is geographically limited and already built out.

As you may know you have peak and off hours on the electrical grid, at sometimes of the day there is a lot of demand, and others very few. However you have to maintain a stable load to allow for constant use. It is possible to bring on other generation as demand dictates so long as it has a fast spin up rate (which things like gas plants have, which makes them popular). You also need a certain amount of current just to keep the grid electrified. Nuclear is base. Wind is extra, and only if currently spinning. You can try to over build things like wind to compensate by factors of 3 or 4, however there is a limiting factor to running current from distance, and locally if it not windy in one place, it is likely not windy in the other, same with sunshine for solar.

So really what I am trying to say is that it is a non-argument because:
A) Alternative energy isn't as easy or a cheap and many think it is for a verity of reasons, and
B) It is really moot as it is comparing apples with oranges.

Anyway don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of wind. It is however limited in its application. What gets me is that when most people talk about nuclear, they are talking about plant designs from 40 years ago, mostly in the US, which were designed with the production of a weaponized byproduct in mind. If people were not so opposed to the idea for so long, and only thinking energy production, just think of the technology we might have by now.

Bottom line is that the only things capable of base are non-renewable (other than maybe hydro, which is limited) so we are talking coal (dirty/cheap), oil (expensive), gas (current whipping boy), and nuclear. Geothermal might also fit, but in all but say Iceland much to limited in nature. Things like biomass are also much too small to do anything. Wind and solar are great if not all that efficient, but they have limited duty in the generation mix due to their by nature non-stable output.

Politics VS Ideology

[DarthVain]

While not an example of electrical grid energy, a perfect example of "what the hell happens" to this is here:

I am from Canada. Even for Canada I am pretty lefty. Not a hippy by any measure, but I lean to the left. Voted NDP (New Democratic Party) a number of times, and they are the most left of the major political parties. They preach all the usual rhetoric, conservation, alternative sources, etc...

An election a while ago in Ontario in an unadulterated attempt to buy votes the NDP leader added a reduction of tax at the pumps "to help families", etc...
1) That is probably the worst thing you could do to fuel conservation, by making it cheaper.
2) Less money in coffers for liberal programs which otherwise you collect via income tax (why should I be taxed more for someone else's gluttonous fuel use?).
3) As per this topic they also came out against nuclear as the boogyman.

Didn't vote NPD again.

Anyway politically seemed stupid to me. Alienate those than have some ideology in an attempt to get more votes, while at the same time promoting the far left fringe. Also the savings would be mostly symbolic, and probably for those most well off which is off ideology as well (drive more, more expansive, less public transit).

Anyway, that is how public policy is made half the time. Not through reasoned thought or design, but politically pandering to one group or another to try and get elected/re-elected. About the only future that is considered is the length of term to election.

Re:Assumptions

[catprog]

http://www.fujitsugeneral.com.au/product/183/art90tuaj/#features

26400 KWh cooling capacity. Or presuming all of the sun goes into the house 264m^2.

To run it requires 10Kwh or 44 of http://www.lowenergydevelopments.com.au/Solar-Panel-230-Watt-24V-Polycrystalline
That equals 72m^2 of the 264m^2 house.

This is presuming the air conditioner actually runs 100% during the day too.

Re:Assumptions

[catprog]

I hear they are shipping it using aluminum.

Aluminum ore comes in. Aluminum comes out.

Re:Assumptions

[catprog]

How many of the 125 million dwellings actually can mount 6KW on them?

What about large scale solar farms like Nevada One?

Wrong!

[DarthVain]

Are you crazy? It is guaranteed profit. It might not be oil rich, but at least in that there is legitimate risk.

1) Get a guaranteed loan from government to build XXX MW of renewable energy for YYY Millions of dollars.
2) Get guaranteed subsidiary contract from government to pay you 80 times the going rate for 20 years.
3) Your plant is now paid off, and you also make a lot of profit. You also have all the assets. Because it is all guaranteed by government, borrow heavily against all that.
4) Repeat.

I mean there is really zero risk, and everything is guaranteed, what is not to love?

Fukashima, Chernobyl etc. examples of nothing...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

...Other than ossified government and environmentalist thinking.

There is NO technical reason to design or build modern day nuclear plants as idiotically unsafe as the ones from the 50s and 60s.

There is NO reason to NOT develop thorium plants which are inherently safer (As both the Chinese and Indians are doing).

And while renewables won't even come close to saving our bacon, I'd rather have them than nothing, which is looking more and more likely as we near the end of energy positive, affordable hydrocarbons.

The problems are not ones of safety. On the political side, nobody is willing to take risks on technology which they are frankly too stupid to understand. Ditto for techno-peasant environmentalists. We've effectively cock-blocked ourselves from solving this problem.

Private VS Gov

[DarthVain]

I know people like to make fun of Gov and ability to not do things right. However NO private company should run a nuclear plant, ever.

The reason for this is liability. 1) No insurance would ever cover it, 2) No Company could cover it anyway. All these things have limited liability built in. The incentive is not there. Greed will make them cut corners for profit without the limiting factor of liability to keep them in check.

Re:thorium OR ???

[Jmc23]

You don't get it.

Non-sustainable is not the way. Education is.

Unfortunately, companies make money off peoples ignorance. We need to grow up.

Re:thorium OR ???

[FlyHelicopters]

Again, I return to the question at hand... would you like 20 new coal fired power plants, or 20 new nuclear power plants? 20 will be built one way or another, if you want any say in what gets built, pick one.

Re:thorium OR ???

[Jmc23]

sigh, it's not good to perceive false dichotomies as true.

You would not like the results.

Re:thorium OR ???

[FlyHelicopters]

The fact is, solar and wind are not going to be enough. Any argument otherwise just delays real solutions. Also true is that conservation won't be enough, our energy use is growing too rapidly for it to do anything other than buy time. Both will help, but we need many more gigawatts of power generation to come online in the next 20 years. That power will have to come from somewhere. Currently, it is coal and natural gas. Would you prefer it remain that way, or would you prefer nuclear?

Re:thorium OR ???

[david_thornley]

Your old electric meter probably had a serious problem: it probably let the electricity you were generating flow back into the system*. Normally, this is just fine. When the power's out, it's dangerous because it energizes power lines that are fully expected to be out. (Making allowances for things like that in models is hard. Making the models is hard; I spent four years working on software that primarily handled outages, so I have some idea of the complexity.)

Nor is it reasonable to sell electricity back for full price. You probably pay for electrical service with one bill charging you on the basis of electricity used. Out of that money, the power company has to maintain and build out infrastructure, monitor the system, run crews out to fix problems, etc, as well as pay for the electricity. It might be reasonable for it to be bought back at the price paid for the electricity, but not more.

*The word "grid" is a bit of a misnomer here. The long-distance high-voltage system is a grid. The distribution system from there on is singly connected, since having some sort of "grid" would cause instabilities. It can take a long time to get the power back on in a system with loops.

Re:Assumptions

[Rakarra]

Not when you calculate in all the entitlement fueled thugspawn running around the ghettos, and the near future billions of shit covered babies in third world countries.. Of course, I'd rather have two intelligent, educated children than a legion of half-invalid, undernourished, paki-babblers, but the leftists won't have any of that. Everyone's 'equal' after all.

It depends on whether you believe in "Idiocracy" or not.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

You forgot to calculate what a similar nuclear plant actually would cost :D
And the problem with nuclear exactly is _that_it_is_always_on. You can not use it to follow the load. Neither up nor down. A wind farm can downscale by disconnecting singular wind mills from the grid.

Also your idea what "base load" is is wrong. In our days the term is only used for reference.
Every energy source/power plant can be used for base load. There is no specific technical/scientific need to a power plant to be "base load capable".

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

France imports over 30% of its power ... so how can it get 80% from nuclear?

Perhaps read a bit up ...

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

What is your point?

Why should an electric company build a wind farm when it already HAS A NUCLEAR plant?

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

Yes, 90% of the news about Fukushima is soothing bullshit. The situation there is far more worth than you believe and the politicians want us to know.

You realize that the source of your information is heavily funded (through advertising) by the same people who will directly benefit (via increased use of natural gas for electricity production) in reduced nuclear power use?

So the inhabitants there are funded? (That is my source of information) by whom?

Pffftt ..... government "inofficialls" are moving from house to house and warn young couples not to get children _EVER_ or move away and wait ten years or more.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

Oil companies are also natural gas companies. They love renewables because next to every wind farm is a gas turbine generating station, which is used during the 70% of the time the wind isn't blowing enough to produce electricity.
That is nonsense.
Wind turbines _offshore_ run 95% of the time. Nearly 60% of the time they produce more power than _rated_ and the rest of the time they are more or less on the rated level.
Wind turbines have no "gas plant" nearby, that would not make any sense at all. It would require that you build a gas pipe and an electric grid to the point where you have the turbines.

Hint: watch sales of wind turbines and gas plants, obviously there is no relation.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

And that 4GW of intermittent (wind) power that you're adding incrementally has to be backed up by natural gas turbine generation.

No it has not. That is a /. myth.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

Except for the fact that you'd need about an acre of PV cells to generate enough electricity to air condition a single-family home, let alone a multistory office building.
And how big is the roof? 4 acres? 10 acres? So what is the problem?

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

By which standard do you define that the plant is overpopulated? As far as I know we only have one planet for reference. Regarding total population that planet does fine so far.

Re:Assumptions

[FlyHelicopters]

I have read the 80% number many times, the current wikipedia page puts the number at 75%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

They operate at extremely high capacity factors compared to every other source
No they don't. They are at roughly 90% like any other fossil plant "would be" as well if the load over day would not scale from 40% to 100%.

FYI: capacity factor is only used by US anti renewable FUD lobbies.

Energy companies don't use the term, it is completely useless to run a fleet of plants.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

In germany solar power is already at "break even".
The question about subsidization depends on how it is done. Here the customers bottom line subsidize solar and wind power.

Solar and wind both stop working regularly depending on weather conditions
A single plant stops working, but not the fleet of all plants we have distributed over germany.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

So, how fast (without any legislation problems, etc.) do you think a nuclear plant can be build?
1 year? 5 years? 10 years? Pffft .... is that relevant in relation to 15 years?

Re: Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

which greatly reduces the waste storage requirements;
That is nonsense.
It _increases_ the waste storage need. (Reprocessing produces quite an amount of waste, too).
The reprocessing is done to get unspent plutonium / uranium back into the cycle.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

Icelands are already connected to the EU mainland with power lines.

In other words: they are already selling power to the EU.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

Strange that so many climate researchers disagree regarding hurricanes, their strength and their frequency.

Regarding forrest fires: not only the USA has *more* and *heavier* fires than in older times.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

Well that is a two way equation ... if the USA would stop defending *us* from the bad guys, the bad guys probably would not exist. Or?

Re:thorium OR ???

[angel'o'sphere]

The coastline of the USA has enough potential for off shore wind farms to power the whole world several times over.

A decent amount of plants at the coast of Oregon and Florida will power the whole USA.

Your ideas about wind and solar are just nonsense ...

Re:Assumptions

[MooseMiester]

Wage/Price controls never work. They have been tried, and tried, and tried again without a single success.

People who don't understand economics believe you can pass some law and fix everything. It just doesn't work...

Re:Assumptions

[MooseMiester]

Cherry picking on year's financials without any details proves nothing. Truth be told, the biggest crime committed by the oil companies is they don't give enough money to Democrats. Seriously.

The same story can be told for the fantasy about those horrible oil company subsidies, that go to small wildcat drillers to encourage exploration. One Solyndra pays for those for several years....

And where does the money for these subsidies come from? More debt? Taxes on the rich? Punish the middle class?

Re:Assumptions

[MooseMiester]

My modern full sized pickup gets 22 MPG. So an 8mpg difference is something I should be punished for? I can afford the fuel.

If it wasn't for the ethanol I am forced to buy along with the gas it would probably get 25 mpg.

Re:Assumptions

[MooseMiester]

If it wasn't for the safety crats, and all those folks in Washington looking out for us, you could get a 60 MPG car for $12,000.

These folks, who gave us mandate after mandate after mandate, is why cars aren't as efficient as they could be. And then we lower the quality of our fuel by rewarding Agri-Business for all of those bribes they paid, and mileage goes down again. And the rules for Ethanol were written so poorly, there is now an overabundance of it, and we are going to be forced to consume more of it, ruining all the poor people's cars in the process.

If the government were put in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a sand shortage.

Re:Assumptions

[MooseMiester]

Absolutely correct. We would have safer, newer nuclear plants if the greenies hadn't fought so hard to stop nuclear energy.

Large scale wind/solar can't survive without subsidies, but big projects pay big bribes to the politicians.

Re:thorium OR ???

[MooseMiester]

Where is this "sub 10K investment to power a reasonably efficient house"? I live in a modest home, very well insulated, and have had two renewable contractors out here. A $20,000 investment in solar has a payback of 20 years, and will handle 30% of our electricity needs - we heat with natural gas. It took days and days of calling just to find a contractor who would return my calls.

No subsidies, no tax credits are available.

Re:Assumptions

[rally2xs]

Yeah, tell me about it. Al Maliki is trying to get us to come back to Iraq right now, 'cuz he's up to his ass in Al Qaeda. So he didn't want that status of forces agreement that would have kept troops in his country even yet. I think he's going to die soon. Gonna happen like that a lot around the globe. Don't bother to call when the tanks roll across YOUR border...

Re:My problem with nuclear == proliforation?

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Activate the material by irradiating it with neutrons and turn it into very short-lived isotopes which then decay into stable ones and release heat.

I'd leave it to someone familiar with fusors and LFTR to say whether the neutron flux would be sufficient to sustain a 'sub critical LFTR' ... but Stuart Henderson delivers a fascinating lecture on Thorium Energy from Accelerator Driven Reactors at TEAC4 in 2012. He is envisioning a passive reactor that is sub-critical when the beam is off, as you have suggested. He says it is essentially an 'energy amplifier'.

Also of note, David LeBlanc of Terrestrial Energy has a vision of Denatured Molten Salt Reactors he shared at TEC5, giving some compelling reasons why single fluid designs offer improved proliferation resistance for small reactors. One of his designs is intended to remain 'sealed' for ~30 years and defer the processing of transuranics, while ensuring its content remains a cocktail of isotopes that would be useless to weapon makers.

Accelerator driven thorium is an interesting idea. I sense a bit of good-natured 'WTF factor' response among those pursuing fissile/fertile Thorium designs. I am sure that they envision their reactor designs may some day become the nuclear reactor equivalent of the modern flush toilet -- a device so simple and elegant that despite cosmetics its form and function would change little over the years.

Using an accelerator to supply neutrons to start a thorium breeding cycle might seem silly when a pinch of uranium could do the trick.

Using an accelerator to keep a thorium reactor going might seem like a waste of (potential) energy for the effort spent designing such things, when keeping a critical breeding concentration of thorium in a properly designed system could do the trick.

Kirk Sorenson is frequently asked about proliferation concerns. He deals with the subject several points in Thorium Remix 2011 and his style has at times encouraged detractors of nuclear energy to believe that he (and other thorium advocates) are casually dismissing proliferation risk.

I see the same things they are seeing, and what I perceive is more of a shrug than a dismissal. To understand the nuance of that you have to see things from their point of view. They are trying to generate heat and electricity.

The flat-fact is that not only is uranium mined and processed to high enrichment world-wide... and produced in water reactors... there are enough ready-made nuclear weapons out there, both known and unaccounted-for (Greetz Israel) that at the current yearly rate of deployment (none) they will last forever.

Wrong hands you say? Only a matter of time. Weaponized uranium will surface eventually just as weaponized anthrax did.

Therefore try to put yourself in the shoes of a reactor designer who is on the brink of solving the world's energy problems for the foreseeable future. This is heady stuff. Not only would the problem be 'solved', it could have effects far beyond even the utopian staples like electric cars and bootstrapping third-world economies. All this could start to happen as soon as we pick a winner and decide that the approach is acceptably safe.

(Looking around) guys and gals... could it be that as the days tick by, our failure to reach consensus and express resolve in solving the problem is unacceptably dangerous?

I do. And I'm not alone. I believe Nuclear energy is just fire, the finest and most noble thing we have yet tamed. If we turn away from it at this point -- in a world of 7 billion people -- it would be a disaster. Taking into consideration who we are today and what we would become as the energy begins to run out. I do not wish my children or their children to experience tha

Re:Assumptions

[DamonHD]

Again, the world is not black and white. Regulation can't fix everything, but a complete lack of it doesn't work either.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Assumptions

[ale2011]

From the article: "Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs, "

But nuclear power is neither cheap nor reliable. So why do they suggest that as a replacement for renewables. As to the "fast enough" part of that, solar and wind can be ramped up much faster than nuclear. The rationale of the article is not logical.

The rationale looks obvious if you think of a reiable way to make money fast enough, by selling cheap energy to the masses. If you allow each household to run their own wind mill, solar cell, or geothermal heat, you get fewer monthly bills. With nuclear plants, in addition, the long term expenses related to thousands of yaers nuclear waste disposal come for free.

Re:Assumptions

[ultranova]

Why should an electric company build a wind farm when it already HAS A NUCLEAR plant?

According to yourself: "So instead of waiting 15 years for a new nuclear plant TO HAVE ANY EFFECT I have an imediate effect if I build wind and solar plants."

So, I dunno if you actually meant it, but getting a profit now rather than in 15 years seems like a huge incentive.

Re:Assumptions

[MooseMiester]

Where did I suggest I would be in favor of a complete lack of regulation?

What I said was that wage and price controls have never worked, ever.

When somebody says "We need a LAW that....." History teaches us that this one shot, silver bullet, just outlaw "X" rarely fixes the problem it was intended to fix, because: The person don't understand economics. Didn't consider the law of unintended consequences. Doesn't take globalization into account. Fails to understand how smart humans are. Don't understand that while laws tend to be fixed at a point in time, the world is not. Fail to understand that once you pass a law, and create some agency to enforce it, you setup a self perpetuating entity that grows and grows, sucking more and more revenue, and eventually becomes solely interested in preserving itself.

It's damn near impossible to control people's behavior at a micro level.

This is the lesson of history. The "We need a LAW that..." mentality has a much to do with high prices, resource shortages, reduced innovation, public debt, deficit spending, crony capitalism, and many of the ills of our society as the conflicting ideologies of both parties...

That doesn't mean regulations are bad. What actually WORKS in the real world is systems that are setup with just the right amount of tension between two sides, in order to achieve a dynamic balance. Take business, for example. Customers demand high quality, low prices, and good service. Stockholders demand high profits because they expect a return on their investment. When these two forces balance out, you have a successful business that keeps both sides happy.

In the progressive model, the government decides what an acceptable level of quality is, the government decides what the lowest price will be, and the government decides what the highest profit allowed is. This insures that no innovation occurs, prices do not reflect reality, and stockholders have no motivation to invest. Business is over regulated, and controlled, there is no conflict built into the system, everything stagnates except for the corrupt political class, who takes every greedy penny they can get their hands on and distributes it among their greedy friends.

One has to regulate just enough to not kill the goose that one is trying to regulate. One of the best ways to demotivate the goose here is to run around in circles, screaming that the sky is falling, suggesting that all kinds of draconian laws are right around the corner, all the while passing plenty of stupid laws along the way to demonstrate a complete ignorance of what makes the goose lay eggs. The result is that the goose is demotivated, and hoards cash, because the whole atmosphere is that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, and more stupid laws are coming any day. Sound familiar? And then the solution is to pass a law that the goose must lay 1.5 eggs a day OR ELSE.

Rgds!

Re:Assumptions

[DarthVain]

Try using solar for base at night, similarly wind while not windy out. That is why they are not suitable for "base" or primary load or whatever you want to call it. The part of demand that makes up most of the load, that does not fluctuate below

I will agree nuclear isn't cheap to build, and it takes a long time, largely because it is big and complex. However there are newer technologies that look to mitigate this, different fuel, different methods, passive systems, smaller plants. However we stopped building decades ago, and will never develop anything better unless we do.

Oil, gas, coal are not the answer. Renewables, while important, are not appropriate in all situations. Even nuclear is non-renewable, but at least it is very long term, and if things like thorium work out, apparently there is almost a forever supply of that (famous last words I know)...

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

Germany is providing a quarter or more of its _baseload_ with wind.

As noted before you don't understand what base load is. I repeat it again: "baselaod is the amount of power you always feed into the grid, regardless of actual demand. This is in germany roughly 40%, and be in your grid a different factor. And that also means: at night between 2:00 and 5:00 you feed MORE energy into the grid as there is actual demand and PUMP into your pumped storage plants"

This all has nothing to do with a hundred years old concept of "base load plants" as those plants only exist for "commercial" reasons and those reasons do change.

There is always enough wind to power your grid, you only need enough displacement between your wind farms.

As the amount of baseload is relatively low, factoring in solar makes nor sense anyway. Solar (pv) is used to help shaping the daytime demand curve. Not the nightly curve which is shaped by baselaod and wind sufficiently.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

That is how it works in germany, due to the renewable energy laws.

However do to a complete different way the energy marked works in the USA it does not work like that.

It is cheaper to run the nuclear plants at 95% instead of 93% and don't build the wind farm ... or what ever the true reasons behind it are :D

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

I don't get what your point is.

But you seem not to get my point either.

The situation in Iran, Iraq and Afganistan is at it is because of the constant interference of the USA with the governments there ... all the now enemies, may it be Taliban or the Iranian religious leaders etc. where founded and funded by the USA. Now you ty to get rid of them and found and fund "anti organizations". As soon as the "anti organizations" manage to set up their own government you realize: "wow they don't behave like we expected". And you repeat that circle.
You do that since 60 years now ... everyone above age of 30 should be able to recognize that pattern.

Re:Assumptions

[angel'o'sphere]

That likely only means they have a production capacity of 75% of their peak load.

It does not mean that they produce 75% of their "consumed GWh" with nuclear. That is "impossible".

To be able to do that you would need to regulate your nuclear power plants over daytime to follow the coarse load change. (Not exactly the peak load, but roughly close to about 200MW or 500MW to the actual load.)

So the only way to do that is to run the plants on fixed output and use the excess power to pump into pumped storages. At night time that would mean that you had to pump up about 50% of your energy production. Or to sell to someone else.

In fact france buys power at night from germany to refill its pumped storages.

Another way would be to just burn the excess power away in huge resistors. But then question again comes: do they count the excess power into that 75% number?

OTOH france is ofc also playing simple tricks. To prevent the need of powering down the nuclear plants over night, they have a very simple smart grid infrastructure, which means e.g. that over night house holds heat up hot water storages with electric power. The same for public swimming pools etc.
Thus the "baselaod" of france might be much higher than in germany. (Allowing to continue to run the plants at a high level)

But that does not explain why france buys so much power at night from germany.

Wrong.

[DarthVain]

Cite your sources.

Wikipedia seems to think differently.

That 40% number you are talking about, is not the percentage of wind being used in total of all power generated.
Wind makes up 36.6% of all the renewable energy generated.
Renewable energy makes up about 25% (which is a lot however, 2012 stats).
That means that wind actually makes up 9.15% of the total generation, so less than 10%, a far cry from nearly half.

Actually Germany is possibly the worst example you could have picked, as while yes they have amped up their renewable program probably more than most larger countries, they have also decided to decommission nuclear plants.

Germany has been trying to decommission these plants for years, but could come up with no alternative solution to generate the power (that was deemed politically acceptable). However with the incident in Japan, they decided politically to make a knee jerk reaction and retire them anyway, without a solution. They just buy the missing energy from external sources. In this case that source is France, which produce most of their current generation with... you got it, nuclear, with more on the way.

So, A) rather than find a solution, they just passed the buck to someone else apparently, and B) now you have your national grid more less supported by another nation, not exactly a good idea. (Though as can be seen in Canada/US a few years back they are not the first to have interdependent systems, however the repercussions were also quite obvious).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Renewable_energy

That took about 5 seconds to find.

Re:Wrong.

[angel'o'sphere]

Baseload is 40%.
Windenergy percentage is about 20% of TOTAL energy.
A quarter of 40% baselaod is 10% (of total energy).
Simple math: half of the wind energy (10% of total) is used for a quarter of baseload (40%), the rest is just fed into the grid as it is available.
(Picking your numbers and applying them correctly).

The rest of your post is mixing up half true and half wrong histories and drawign wrong conclusions from that.

Re:Assumptions

[jwhitener]

If we took subsidies away from oil and energy producers, and included the cost to the environment and human health by pushing those back on the energy and oil companies, the free market would quickly re-adjust the cost of energy to a more accurate figure.

The reason people want to raise the price of dirty non-sustainable energy is mainly because through lobbying and other means, no external costs are ever attached to the production or use of said energy. Which means that competing energy sources, with very low external costs, but higher operation or start up costs, cannot compete fairly.

It is no different than if we both owned dairy farms. Both farms were located along the banks of a river. Now, my Uncle happens to be the Governor of the State, so I was able to arrange to get a 'waste dumping permit' which allowed me to just push my cow waste right into the river. You can't get a permit, so you are forced to ship your cow waste off to a processing and recycling center, which is much more costly than just dumping it in the river. You can guess who's milk is going to be cheaper for consumers to buy. Not to mention all the detriment to users of the river downstream.

There is a debate to be had about exactly what the costs should be concerning air pollution and human health, environmental impacts like rising temperatures, increasing ocean acidification, etc.. but to pretend that oil/coal have no external costs is gaming the free market system.

   

Re: Assumptions

[budgenator]

First a radionucliotide is essentially non-existant after a period of 10 half-lives so Iodine 131 having a half-life of 8 days, is gone in 3 months, cesium with a half-life of 30.17 years is gone in 3 centuries. Both curium and americium are either fertile or fissile depending on whether the atomic weight is even or odd but regardless both are nuclear fuels.

Cesium is the closest to being a show stopper , but is medically usefull, yet without it anybody and their brothers would be extracting plutonium; so most of your supposed waste, isn't waste.

Re:Assumptions

[Shadow99_1]

Actually since water vapor in clouds is a 'green house' gas, many hot days are rainy or overcast. Though this varies by region. Places like Nevada tend to have dry hot days, places like Florida or other parts of the east coast of the US (for instance) tend to be wet and hot.

Re:Assumptions

[Shadow99_1]

Except that even if 1/3rd of it is credited or subsidized the remaining 2/3rds may not be within reach of the current owner. A considerable number of people in the US alone live paycheck to paycheck and could never afford the 2/3rds costs to update such a thing. Especially the poor in the 'country' outside of the cities tend to own (with mortgages) their homes, rather than targeting landlords in cities (who may have the funds and just not want to spend them).

i stand corrected

[rewindustry]

i think.

apparently the materials i am worried about are used for more "special" cells, whereas "old school" PV tech really is mostly sand.

on the other hand wiki claims a larger "ecological footprint" for straight silicon, which i do not pretend to understand.

perhaps the problem is simply the amount of energy extracted, over an approximately thirty year lifespan, versus the amount of energy used to manufacture.

most of this appears to be the need for heat and hydrogen, both of which could be supplied by solar, i assume, and which may mean the process is self bootable...

so, in the end, perhaps i need to rethink my position on PV in general...

for which i thank you, and slashdot, very much.

Re:i stand corrected

[DamonHD]

EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested) is better for solar PV than for tar sands for example, even in the UK, AFAIK.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Assumptions

[volmtech]

About 500 generations ago people WALKED across the Bering Straits. Sea levels have risen since then. How can we be sure the water isn't supposed to get any deeper?

Re:Assumptions

[phantomfive]

While what you say is true, it is not addressing the point of the post you responded to.

Re:thorium OR ???

[pla]

yeah, because saying it will make it a reality, right?

"We'll pay you $1500/year and give you a free "car tunnel" to park in and/or keep the snow off your driveway".

You gonna say no, assuming they don't insult you with something so hideous that your neighbor in the purple house with orange trim would run screaming from the offer?


Posts like this [...] are the proof slashdot has gone down the drain.

Agreed. Slashdot needs to ban ACs, no doubt about it.

Re:Assumptions

[F34nor]

According to Outliers by Malcolm Galdwell most of the richest people ever got that way from oil. That's not subsidies that's their marginal tax rate.

Re:Assumptions

[mysidia]

One way is to keep the first kWh cheap and have a rising block price per kWh against usage: if you're not running a McMansion with the windows wide open in winter you need never hit the punitive tariff bands. Just for example.

*Cough* Watch us buy up an "apartment complex"; to populate with virtual tenants, tally up, and resell all 100000 of their unused 1kwH blocks, to the owners of the rows of McMansions down the street.

Re:Assumptions

[DamonHD]

Yes, I've heard of fraud.

One reason to keep the tariff rise in check is to minimise the value and thus amount of such fraud while having something significant enough to be noticed by most people.

No single policy instrument can be perfect, but people do give at least some attention to things that they pay for, even though the response is massively non-linear.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Assumptions

[cheesybagel]

The best way is to build the friggin house properly for the climate in question in the first place. Then you can consider things like air conditioning or whatever. I mean if Genghis could live in Mongolia nearly 1000 years ago why do these people "need" air conditioning?

Re:Nuclear, really....?

[cheesybagel]

There is no 100% safe answer to the problem. We have been dealing with the consequences ever since we learned how to use fire. It is all a matter of tradeoffs. Once people realize that, then we can have sound energy policies.

Re:Fukashima, Chernobyl etc. examples of nothing..

[cheesybagel]

I am not against renewables. Hydro and wind power are economic and make sense to a point. However they cannot make up for 100% of supply. Hence we need either coal, nuclear or whatever to fill up the rest of the generation capacity. Solar will be cheap eventually but like wind it is an intermittent energy source. IMO one reason for the growing economic gap between the rich and poor is the growing cost of energy. Taxing nuclear power plants to subsidize windmills in places where there isn't enough wind resource for them to make sense is not the answer.